PRESS - HP AND INFORMIX TO EXPAND RESEARCH AT ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT LAB; ANNOUNCE ONLINE XPS ON HP 9000 SERVERS

Expect details in the near future on these and other joint development projects with HP as they evolve. Steve Deck HP Business Development Mgr. EDITORIAL CONTACTS: Scott Hauan, HP (408) 447-1415 Cecilia Denny, Informix (415) 926-6420 HP AND INFORMIX TO EXPAND RESEARCH AT ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT LAB; ANNOUNCE ONLINE XPS ON HP 9000 SERVERS PALO ALTO, Calif., July 18, 1995 -- Hewlett-Packard Company and Informix Software, Inc., today announced that the companies will expand their joint worldwide advanced-technology research and development efforts with the formation of an Advanced Development Lab located at Informix's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters and HP's Cupertino, Calif. offices. The companies also said that lab-team efforts have produced excellent scalability of INFORMIX-OnLine Extended Parallel Server (OnLine XPS) running on a multinode parallel configuration of HP 9000 K-class symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers. These results are being demonstrated at Informix's Worldwide User Conference, San Jose Convention Center (San Jose, Calif.) this week. Under the terms of the agreement, both companies have committed to providing resources to support the efforts of the lab. The Advanced Development Lab teams will exploit and integrate current and future advanced technologies from HP and Informix. The teams' efforts are expected to make managing the complex environments required to support key business processes -- such as decision support, customer service and product development within the financial services, telecommunications and manufacturing industries -- more timely and efficient. "Informix is one of HP's largest database and tools partners worldwide, and the establishment of this lab will foster the delivery of real solutions to a marketplace that is right-sizing legacy applications, implementing enormous data-warehouse initiatives and developing high-quality client-server applications," said Richard W. Sevcik, HP vice president and general manager of the Systems Technology Group. The Advanced Development Lab complements the companies' joint Advance Solutions Centers in Somerset, N. J., and Boeblingen, Germany, announced earlier this year. At the centers, customers can model and test data warehousing and on-line transaction processing (OLTP) environments for their specific needs. "The lab creates a tighter, joint engineering relationship between the two companies and enables HP and Informix to provide more timely, scaleable and better-integrated solutions for our mutual customers," said Mike Saranga, senior vice president of product management and development at Informix. HP and Informix Advanced Development Lab The Advanced Development Lab characterizes, develops and optimizes integrated HP and Informix decision-support systems (DSS) and OLTP solutions for customers. Most recently, the lab has focused its efforts on fine-tuning parallel configurations of HP 9000 SMP servers with Fibre Channel connections for customers who require multiterabyte-size database implementations. "Many of our customers are embarking on larger and larger data-warehouse projects, and they are concerned about performance, scalability and investment protection," said Sevcik. "OnLine XPS and HP's high-performance computing offerings give customers the price/performance they need today and the scalability they need for tomorrow." OnLine XPS is a highly scalable, reliable, high-performance, open database server that provides the power needed to help manage increasingly larger and more complex databases while substantially improving overall system performance, scalability and availability. HP's implementation of OnLine XPS is scheduled for selected joint customer sites this fall. Engineers are working together to combine and characterize various types of data storage, connection methodologies and future HP hardware/software solutions with Informix's Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA) to achieve industry-leading, high-end SMP performance for OLTP and data-warehousing solutions. Other projects include expansion and integration of the multimedia capabilities that exist within Informix's DSA and projects that optimize the performance of the integration of business applications on HP and Informix systems. "To support these efforts, the lab has been furnished with state-of-the-art hardware and software, including OnLine XPS on HP's K-class systems, and it will continue to be outfitted with the latest technology," said Saranga. The HP and Informix Relationship The HP and Informix relationship was established in 1980 to exploit and integrate the companies' complementary technologies -- HP's industry-leading client/server-based architecture with Informix's high-performance parallel-processing database -- to meet customers' needs. Systems that are available and shipping today provide HP and Informix's high-end performance results of 3,118 transactions per minute (tpmC) running Informix's OnLine Dynamic Server Version 7.1 on an HP 9000 Model T500 8-way SMP server. HP and Informix have implemented data warehouses at customer sites, including DHL Worldwide Express and Transamerica Commercial Finance. "The HP and Informix data warehousing solution is the best choice due to Informix's Dynamic Scaleable Architecture and HP's strong customer focus and high-performance servers," said Carole P. Hershman, vice president and chief information officer of Transamerica Commercial Finance. HP 9000 business servers, based on HP's industry-leading HP-UX(1) enterprise operating system and PA-RISC(2) technology, provide the high-performance and systems-management capabilities required by data-center environments, as well as the flexibility and performance necessary for client/server implementations. Informix Software is a leading supplier of high performance, parallel processing database technology for open systems. The company's database servers are the number one choice of computer hardware manufacturers for publishing the Transactions Processing Council (TPC) benchmarks for UNIX-based systems. Informix products also include application development tools for creating client/server production applications, decision support systems and ad-hoc query interfaces, and connectivity software that allows information to be shared transparently from PCs to mainframes within the corporate computing environment. The company's corporate headquarters is in Menlo Park, California. HP is the second-largest computer supplier in the United States, with computer-related revenue of $19.6 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 98,600 employees and had revenue of $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. # # # INFORMIX-OnLine Dynamic Server and Dynamic Scalable Architecture are products of Informix Software, Inc. (1) HP-UX 9.X and 10.0 for HP 9000 Series 700 and 800 computers are X/Open(tm) Company UNIX 93 branded products.