IBM Offers DRDA to X/Open
Announces Advances in Client/Server Architecture

SOMERS, NY, May 17, 1995 . . . IBM today announced that it has offered its
Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) specification to
X/Open Company Limited for inclusion within the X/Open Common Applications
Environment (CAE). A core technology of the DATABASE 2 (DB2) family, DRDA
is part of IBM's Open Blueprint, the market-leading approach for open
distributed computing.

IBM also reaffirmed DRDA's ability to support the transaction processing
environment using stored procedures and two-phase commit. In addition, a
number of industry software vendors have announced products that support
DRDA, illustrating its continued momentum in the marketplace and providing
users a more flexible and cost-effective solution for their distributed
data environments.

"Today's announcements reinforce IBM's commitment to satisfy a broad range
of database interoperability requirements within multivendor customer
environments," said Chris Arnold, vice president of data management
solutions, IBM Software Solutions Division. "DRDA is clearly leading the
way as the open database protocol of the data management industry."

X/Open Company is a worldwide independent organization, dedicated to
bringing the benefits of open computing to the software industry. It
creates and manages a comprehensive set of publicly available open systems
specifications, including de facto and international standards, which
define the CAE.

DRDA is an attractive candidate for adoption as a component of the CAE as
it was designed to satisfy a broad range of database interoperability
requirements within heterogeneous environments.

                DRDA:  A Widely Accepted Protocol

     Customers and software vendors praised IBM's offer of DRDA
     to X/Open:

     "X/Open welcomes all initiatives to make the IT industry
     more open and is in the process of assessing whether the
     breadth of industry support for DRDA is sufficient for
     integration into the X/Open open systems environment."
     Mike Lambert, vice president and chief technical officer,
     X/Open.

     "Swiss Bank Corporation will welcome the DRDA architecture
     becoming an X/Open standard.  This makes DRDA a common
     standard for distributing data among different platforms."
     Rolf Dippold, director of database management and
     architecture, Swiss Bank Corporation.

     "As the first open systems database vendor to implement
     DRDA, Informix is pleased to see this standard mature from
     de facto to de jure."
     Stewart M. Griffith, product manager, INFORMIX-Gateway with
     DRDA, Informix Software.

     "DRDA has significant advantages over solutions provided
     by other vendors.  The two-phase commit provides greater
     robustness and data integrity, with good response time and
     low administrative costs in the client/server environment,
     than is available elsewhere."
     Marco Chou, system consultant, Allstate Insurance Company.

     "IBM's Distributed Database Connection Services (DDCS), a
     DRDA product for the LAN, provides the most cost-effective
     method to move data and do processing between platforms.
     With the DB2 family and other DRDA products, DDCS provides a
     way for people and processes to transparently access data
     while ensuring data integrity regardless of where the data
     exists.  Compared to all the solutions available, DRDA and
     DDCS provide the most open and cost-effective solution."
     David Beulke, database administration manager for DB2,
     Spiegel, Inc.

In addition, leading industry software vendors continue to support DRDA by
announcing availability of products that implement the technology. Earlier
this year, StarWare, Inc. launched a DRDA Application Requestor product
while XDB Systems, Inc. introduced a DRDA Application Server product.
Grandview DB/DC Systems announced products that support requester
capability and DRDA access to Oracle and SQL Server databases. In
addition, Attachmate Corporation recently licensed the DRDA architecture.
In total, 18 vendors have now licensed the DRDA technology, with nine
having announced or delivered DRDA implementations.

                   Enhanced OLTP Support

With the availability of the DRDA product support for stored procedures and
a two-phase commit, the IBM DB2 family can more efficiently support
On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) in a distributed database
environment. The new stored procedure support greatly enhances the
performance in a DRDA environment by allowing an application to make a
single SQL call to a remote procedure that may contain multiple SQL
statements, thereby reducing the network transmissions between a client
and a server. The ability to reuse stored procedures also results in
greater productivity of application programmers while reducing development
cost.

DRDA two-phase commit is currently available on DB2 for MVS and OS/400 and
has been announced for DB2 for OS/2 and AIX.

IBM is the world's largest producer of database management software in the
industry today. Eighty percent of the FORTUNE 500, including the top 100
companies, rely on DB2 database solutions to manage data on mainframes,
minicomputers, RISC workstations and personal computers. IBM's Software
Solutions Division provides data management, application development and
workgroup solutions for mission-critical applications on PCs,
workstations, LANs and host systems.

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