SYBASE SELECTED AS CORE TECHNOLOGY FOR NASA's "DATABASE OF THE CENTURY" 

Sybase Awarded Landmark Contract For Hughes' Work With NASA On "Mission To
Planet Earth" Project

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 3,1995 -- Sybase Inc., The Enterprise
Client/Server Company_, has been selected as the core software provider
for the largest environmental monitoring effort ever undertaken -- a NASA
venture that will result in what environmental scientists are calling "The
Database of the Century." 

The contract, awarded to Sybase by Hughes Information Technology Corp., the
project's prime contractor, after an extensive competitive review,
positions Sybase as the central software provider for NASA's unprecedented
Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) project, whose
mission is to monitor how human behavior is affecting the Earth's
environment. 

Sybase's database, middleware, and tool products -- including SQL Server
and Replication Server -- will be the principal information-management
foundation for the massive EOSDIS project, whose database eventually will
grow at a rate of one trillion bytes per day. Moreover, Sybase technology
will ensure that the database is simultaneously accessible to thousands of
scientists, environmentalists, and educators around the world. Vision
International's Spatial Query Server (SQS) will provide spatial data
management for the project. 

"EOSDIS will enable us to conduct research that has never been possible
before," said Jeff Dozier, a professor at the University of California at
Santa Barbara. "EOSDIS will provide us with the information we need to
replace data models with real data in our research. This will allow us to
quantify -- rather than estimate -- our findings. This, in turn, will lead
to better research in all of the earth sciences, from weather prediction
to atmospheric analysis." 

"Client/server database technology is absolutely critical to the success of
EOSDIS and we are confident that we made the best choice with Sybase,"
said Robert A. Horrigan, project manager for the EOSDIS core program at
Electronic Data Systems Inc. (EDS). EDS is the hardware and software
procurement manager for EOSDIS, working with Hughes Information
Technology, which is the project's prime contractor. "Beyond Sybase's
strong product features, such as scalability and interoperability, we also
were impressed with Sybase's overall product and technology vision as well
as the level of involvement on the part of the Sybase executive team," he
said. 

"We are excited that Sybase was selected to provide the technology
foundation for this important environmental project that will help us all
take better care of the world," said Sybase chairman, president, and chief
executive officer Mark Hoffman. "The NASA contract award also provides
important reaffirmation of Sybase's overall product strength and
validation of our strategies for the future. The EOSDIS project confronted
us with a demanding set of requirements and we demonstrated that we can
fulfill them better than any other company in the industry." 

"Mission To Planet Earth"

The EOSDIS project applies many of the same techniques NASA has used to
explore outer space to explore and track changes in the earth's
environment. EOSDIS data will be gathered by six satellites, hundreds of
land- and sea-based monitoring systems and by space shuttle missions. 

This data, gathered daily, will create a database that will reach the 3
terabyte range soon after the program is fully operational in 1998 and
eventually will grow into the petabyte range. A petabyte is 1,000
gigabytes, or the equivalent of a stack of typical office memos 2,500
miles high. 

Information gathered as part of the EOSDIS project will be used by
scientists worldwide for quantitative research on the Earth's climate,
with a special focus on how human behavior has effected seven primary
areas: 

* The role of clouds, radiation, water vapor, and precipitation; 
* The productivity of the oceans, their circulation and air/sea
  exchange; 
* Sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and their atmospheric
  transformations;
* Changes in land use, land cover, primary productivity, and the
  water cycle; 
* The role of polar ice sheets and sea level; 
* The coupling of ozone chemistry with climate and the biosphere; and 
* The role of volcanoes in climate change. 

Project Specifications

The agreement includes more than 700 Sybase product licenses. Also included
are licenses to Spatial Query Server (SQS), a product developed by Sybase
technology partner Vision International Group of Autometric Inc.,
Alexandria VA. The product, based on Sybase's Open Server technology,
allows users to construct multi-dimensional data requests, a feature that
is key to the success of the EOSDIS program. 

Using Spatial Query Server, environmental scientists will, for example, be
able to structure queries regarding atmospheric conditions over rain
forests at a specific longitude, latitude and altitude. This level of
functionality is typically not found in commercial database products where
data is stored in two-dimensional formats. 

The EOSDIS project is built around a heterogeneous hardware model that will
be used to support a distributed client/server database that will be made
available to thousands of users worldwide. 

The following products will be the core technologies for the EOSDIS
project: SQL Server:

* Sybase's SQL client/server relational database management system for
  on-line, mission-critical applications;
* Replication Server: Provides real-time data movement while ensuring
  data integrity across a geographically distributed environment;
* Enterprise SQL Server Manager_: An essential tool for local and
  remote administration of the SQL Server environment;
* Open Gateways: A family of gateway products for read/write access
  that provides complete SQL translation and location transparency and
  the ability to easily merge information from different data sources;
  and
* SQS: The first high performance spatial query engine for Sybase SQL
  Server for managing spatial data. 

Those client/sever database technologies will be used in a hardware
environment that includes products from Silicon Graphics Inc., IBM Corp.,
Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Digital Equipment Corp., and
others. 

Data Analysis And Distribution

EOSDIS data will be gathered and analyzed at seven research centers. These
include four NASA facilities, two university-based research laboratories,
and a facility operated by the U.S. Interior Department. 

In turn, the data will be used by 28 EOSDIS interdisciplinary investigation
teams established by NASA to develop a quantitative understanding of the
processes that govern the Earth's climate and to incorporate that
knowledge into predictive models that can serve as the basis for
environmental policy decisions. This process involves 12 university-based
teams in the U.S.; seven NASA facilities and nine overseas research
institutions. Additionally, EOSDIS data and images will be available to
elementary schools and high schools around the world for use in earth
sciences curricula. 

Sybase, Inc. 

Sybase, Inc. is a worldwide leader in client/server software. Sybase and
its wholly owned subsidiary Powersoft Corporation are focused on four
major market segments: mass deployment, on-line transaction processing,
data warehousing and electronic commerce. Sybase's software products --
database, middleware and tools -- provide customers with desktop to
enterprise solutions. The company's mission is to provide its customers
with an open, adaptable information systems architecture that enables them
to develop and deliver complete information systems solutions to
facilitate rapid business change. Headquartered in Emeryville, CA, Sybase
is the sixth largest independent software company in the world. 

Sybase Inc
6475 Christie Ave
Emeryville, CA 04608
510-596-3500;  Fax: 510-658-9441
 
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