Talarian Delivers On RIDE Promise: SmartSockets 5.1 Raises the Bar on Ease-of-Use, Flexibility As Scalability and Performance Rise to Industry-Leading Levels;.

LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 1999--

IP Multicast Offers Programmers More Choices When Building

Applications

Talarian(R) Corporation today announced SmartSockets(R) 5.1 with enhancements that continue to deliver on the company's RIDE(TM) (Rapid Infrastructure Development Experience) promise to streamline and accelerate development of enterprise-scale distributed systems. Moreover, new features, such as a leading-edge implementation of IP Multicast and significant performance boosts for its Java version smooth the way for enterprises progressing toward zero- or low-latency systems.

Demands on middleware have been shifting over the last few years such that larger and more complex applications are expected to move messages across hundreds and even thousands of machines almost instantaneously over the span of entire enterprises. Improvements in SmartSockets 5.1 are designed to meet these demands with increasingly competitive levels of performance and scalability not previously offered by other middleware products.

SmartSockets 5.1 is available immediately on most major computing platforms and automatically accessible by current Talarian customers who are under maintenance contracts.

Leading-Edge Vision for IP Multicast

SmartSockets RIDE architecture minimizes and speeds many infrastructure development tasks that used to burden developers. In keeping with that promise, SmartSockets 5.1 now transparently supports the IP Multicast protocol and has implemented a reliable version of the technology that offers programmers more choices in how information is distributed across the network.

Talarian considers IP Multicast one of the most fundamental technologies to help reshape organizations into zero latency enterprises -- a term that describes the ability for networks to disseminate new information with virtually no latency between the time it is received and when it is made available enterprise-wide. Talarian has committed significant resources to its implementation of reliable IP Multicast and will continue to develop innovative capabilities for its implementation.

Besides reducing network bandwidth, SmartSockets 5.1 is the only IP Multicast-enabled middleware product that handles unknown or missing data, often found in time-series data, eliminating the need for programmers to write complex code to handle these special situations.

SmartSockets 5.1 also is the only middleware that allows developers to choose whether messages are sent across the network using reliable Unicast or Multicast. This level of flexibility is required for large mission-critical applications in which processes must communicate over the WAN or the Internet.

"Our improvements to the IP Multicast technology offer a measure of flexibility and ease-of-use that no other middleware offers but which high-performance, enterprise-scale applications running over hundreds and thousands of machines require now," said Tom Laffey, chief technical officer. "Developers no longer need to worry about the complexity of developing reliable IP Multicast communication when SmartSockets handles the task for them.

SmartSockets Gets a Java Kick

As object-oriented languages and techniques have come into vogue, so have client/server systems increasingly moved toward object-orientation, and an entire market has been building up around the use of Java for the enterprise. Applications running on these systems offer precisely the scale and complexity that require the high-performance, real-time, flexible capabilities of SmartSockets.

SmartSockets 5.1 supports this trend by delivering a 50 percent increase in performance over the SmartSockets Java product released last spring.

SmartSockets' 5.1 Java class library also offers additional RIDE enhancements, a key one being object serialization. With object serialization, Java objects can be passed within a SmartSockets message, allowing programmers to continue to work in an object-oriented paradigm. Object serialization, as a result, allows programmers to focus on the quality and innovation of their Java development, completing their projects with greatest efficiency.

ActiveX and UniCode

SmartSockets 5.1 is Talarian's first implementation of ActiveX. With this version, SmartSockets now can be integrated seamlessly with all leading ActiveX products. SmartSockets messages, for example, now can deliver information directly into an Excel spreadsheet, giving users greater flexibility and ease-of-use among disparate applications on a network.

For both its Java and ActiveX versions, SmartSockets 5.1 also now offers Unicode support, the standard for international character representation. Talarian has stepped up its international availability of SmartSockets and plans to continue to bolster its global presence -- with Unicod support being one key move in that direction.

About SmartSockets

SmartSockets is a complete publish-subscribe middleware solution that offers the industry's richest application programming interfaces (APIs) and class libraries, enabling development of distributed systems faster than any other middleware product.

Talarian collectively refers to the features and programming interfaces enabling rapid development as RIDE(TM) or Rapid Infrastructure Development Experience. SmartSockets helps project teams build real-time, highly distributed applications in dynamic, heterogeneous environments. It offers 100 percent fault tolerance, high performance, and unlimited scalability.

SmartSockets is used for the world's most demanding, high-performance applications, including financial trading, traffic-control systems, satellite ground-control systems, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications fraud detection.

About Talarian Corporation

Talarian Corporation, founded in 1989, is a veteran provider of publish-subscribe middleware to some of the world's largest and fastest-growing businesses. Customers include D.E. Shaw, British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, MCI, Lockheed Martin, Nortel, PG&E, and PLATINUM Technology, Inc. A member of the Message-Oriented Middleware Association (MOMA) and the Object Management Group (OMG), Talarian is a privately held company headquartered at 333 Distel Circle, Los Altos, Calif., 94022-1404. Phone: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. E-mail: [e-mail], URL: http://www.talarian.com.

Note to Editors: Talarian and SmartSockets are registered trademarks of Talarian Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned herein may be the property of their respective owners.