PRESS: MAPINFO AND INFORMIX PARTNER TO BRING ENHANCED SPATIAL

MapInfo and Informix Partner to Bring Enhanced Spatial Data Analysis to Market TROY, N.Y., March 25, 1996- MapInfo Corporation (NASDAQ:MAPS), the recognized leader in desktop mapping software for nearly a decade, today announced a strategic partnership with Informix Software, Inc. (NADSAQ:IFMX), the leading provider of parallel processing database technology, to provide geographic and visualization capabilities to the Informix-NewEra client/server development environment. The combination of MapInfo and Informix-New-Era will allow corporate end-users, at all levels, new ways to access, analyze, visualize and share data across the enterprise. Users will now be able to send complex spatial queries to Informix databases and see the results geographically in MapInfo. For example, a long distance telephone service provider looking to grow its customer base would be able to conduct in-depth spatial queries of its data located in an Informix database to facilitate effective marketing and business development decisions. By plotting its existing equipment and cable network onto a digital map, and overlaying key information such as population and economic growth forecasts, its competitors market share, and demographic information for specific geographic regions, the phone company would receive a clear understanding of the specific market trends and expansion opportunities, as well as discover new ways to better serve their existing customers. "Tapping into valuable corporate data through client/server technology will bring the power of desktop mapping to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide," said MapInfo president and CEO Brian D. Owen. "Our strategic partnership with industry leaders like Informix will unleash data in legacy systems for spatial data analysis that bring competitive advantage to organizations." "Corporations today require high-performance client/server-based database applications to dramatically improve business results," said Phil White, chairman and CEO, Informix. "By integrating leading mapping technology from MapInfo, NewEra's development environment makes possible new applications that integrate vast amounts of corporate data into a single view on a map. The commitment to the reseller channel of both MapInfo and Informix will bring our technology to a wide range of business markets, meeting specific corporate requirements for database solutions." Under the technology partnership, developers will be able to build NewEra industry-specific applications that leverage MapInfo's desktop mapping capabilities through the use of a MapInfo class library. Class libraries are the primary building blocks of any NewEra application, enabling developers to add new functionality into existing applications without having to code from scratch, overhaul the application or re-write legacy code. Instead, they can simply plug a class library into their modular application architecture and the new functionality is ready to implement. Informix is currently conducting a series of NewEra seminars across the United States. MapInfo will be demonstrating the capabilities and functionality being provided through the partnership at a select number of the seminars. For further information, call (800) 647-6522. About Informix Informix Software, Inc., is the leading supplier of high performance, parallel processing database technology for open 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. Informix's corporate headquarters is based in Menlo Park, California. More information about Informix is available via the World Wide Web: http://www.informix.com. About MapInfo MapInfo Corporation (Troy, NY) is the worldwide leader in desktop mapping solutions with products in use by 150,000 customers in virtually every industry, to organize, manage and analyze information in a highly visual way. The company's products are available in 58 countries and 16 languages and are sold through multi-channel distribution involving direct sales, resellers and distributors. MapInfos software runs on Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 3.1.x, Power Macintosh, Macintosh, Sun and Hewlett-Packard platforms. MapInfo Corporation is on the World Wide Web at http://www.mapinfo.com. ### MapInfo is a trademark of MapInfo Corporation. Other products named herein may be trademarks of their respective manufacturers and are here hereby recognized. INFORMIX and NewEra are trademarks of Informix Software, Inc.