Xerox, JP Morgan Are Newest Members of Software Productivity Consortium.

HERNDON, Va.--(BUSNIESS WIRE)--May 6, 1998--

--Consortium membership now comprises over 60 companies, government

agencies, and universities

--Software process improvement services key to membership decision

--JP Morgan first "Service Member"

The Software Productivity Consortium Wednesday announced the addition of Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX) and JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) to its membership roster, which now comprises over 60 companies, government agencies, and academic organizations.

Representatives from both firms cited the Consortium's program of systems and software process improvement technologies and services as instrumental in their decision to join.

Xerox and JP Morgan join AT&T, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Tracor, TRW, United Technologies, and 25 other leading companies as Consortium members. In addition, over 35 government agencies and universities also maintain annual affiliations with the Consortium.

Membership and affiliation in the Consortium has grown rapidly in recent years as more companies and government agencies have come to adopt systems and software process improvement strategies supported by Consortium products and services.

Xerox Corp.

Headquartered in Stamford, Conn., Xerox Corp. is a global company that offers the industry's widest array of document-related business solutions, products and services. Xerox's Consortium membership was coordinated through the Xerox Software Engineering Center, a group responsible for a corporate wide software excellence program.

The Software Engineering Center was established within Xerox as a response to a challenge set by Xerox CEO Paul Allaire in 1994, to adopt the software Capability Maturity Model (CMM(a)) as a guiding framework, and be operating at CMM level 3 by 1999.

(a) The CMM is a five-level framework for advancing software process maturity, developed by the Software Engineering Institute, widely used within the aerospace/defense arena and increasingly popular in commercial software development organizations.

Xerox tapped Consortium personnel for a software process assessment and post-assessment action planning workshop in 1997, and saw enough of the underlying Consortium program of technologies and other services to make a membership decision.

"Our search for more intensive, hands-on consulting support in the area of software process improvement led us to the Consortium," said David ("R.A.") Neale, a member of the Software Engineering Center. "The Consortium's track record of speeding organizational achievement of higher software maturity levels also facilitated our membership decision, particularly as we see the higher levels of software maturity as providing increasingly greater business value."

"The Consortium program offers immediate value in process improvement training and consulting services, as well as potential longer-term benefits via technology development efforts in areas of object-oriented technologies, automated testing, systems engineering. and benchmarking," said Bob Factor, chief software engineer at the Corporate Engineering Center.

JP Morgan

The Center of Quality Group at JP Morgan, responsible for the corporate-wide implementation of improved systems and software development processes and technologies, is the unit that has initiated a "Service Membership" with the Consortium.

(The Service Membership, a new Consortium membership model, offers potential full members access to Consortium training courses, technologies, consulting services, and interactive, members-only events.)

Prior to initiation of service membership, Consortium consultants helped a key JP Morgan program achieve Level 2 maturity in less than nine months, far below industry average timeframes.

Based on the results of this initial pilot program, JP Morgan executives estimate that significant increases in product quality and decreases in systems defects will continue to result as the use of the CMM framework grows\throughout JP Morgan's software development programs.

"Collectively, one of the most important byproducts of our growing adherence to CMM-based software development is faster time-to-market in the intensely competitive financial services market," said Nabil Abdel-Malek, vice president of process improvement in the Center of Quality Group. "For projects using our CMM deployment methodology for six months or longer, we estimate the number of defects in development software can be reduced by 40% to 60%, communication effectiveness can be tripled, and productivity can potentially improve by up to 30%." -0-

The Software Productivity Consortium (www.software.org) was founded in 1985 to provide its members with a collaborative mechanism for forging solutions to common problems in systems and software engineering.

Building on growing expertise in systems and software design, requirements analysis, reuse, testing, and measurement, the Consortium technical program has come to embody an integrated focus on the processes and engineering methods needed to improve systems quality, reliability, and development cycle times.

The Consortium's members and affiliates include over 60 companies, government agencies, and academic or nonprofit organizations. -0- CMM and Capability Maturity Model are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University.

CONTACT: Software Productivity Consortium

Greg Friedmann, APR, 703/742-7158

e-mail: [e-mail]

www.software.org