PRESS - INFORMIX ANNOUNCES INFORMIX-NEWERA VERSION 2.0

INFORMIX ANNOUNCES INFORMIX-NEWERA VERSION 2.0 Includes New Features for Rapid Application Development, Application Partitioning, and Character-based Deployment SAN JOSE, Calif. (July 18, 1995) Q Informix Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:IFMX) today announced INFORMIX(R)-NewEra(TM), version 2.0, the company's graphical client/server development environment, at its fourth annual Worldwide User Conference. NewEra is a comprehensive client/server, object-oriented application development environment that offers customers a next-generation approach to creating and maintaining enterprise applications. NewEra 2.0 adds new features for rapid application development, application partitioning, and multiplatform deployment, all focused on further increasing developer productivity, and increasing application flexibility in order to respond to constant business change. "The most important aspect of NewEra is its core architecture," said Geoff Roach, director of application development for Informix. "This architecture that we introduced a year ago, has enabled us to extend the capabilties of NewEra to support core business functions today and well into the future. Many of the new features provided in this latest release will enable customer applications to perform optimally in an enterprise environment.They will also allow customers to prototype and deploy applications more rapidly, and give them unique flexibility to deploy applications concurrently across UNIX, Windows, and terminal-based environments." Increased Benefits With NewEra 2.0 The new version of NewEra 2.0, scheduled for availability in August 1995, incorporates new capabilities that offer application developers increased benefit in the areas of application extensibility, productivity, and scalability. -- Application Server Class Library - With the Application Server Class Library,NewEra customers will we able to separate, or partition, distributed, client/server applications into several discrete, manageable components, and move those components for more efficient processing between a server and client machines. Users benefit by maintaining valuable CPU and memory resources on PC clients, and maximize application performance by reducing network overhead. Application partitioning enables large client/server applications to be deployed, especially for mobile applications, where laptop CPU and memory are relatively limited. -- Character-based Visual Class Library - Informix has extended its platform deployability to character-based terminals through the use of a character-based Visual Class Library, expanding customersU ability to take their NewEra-built applications and run them on Motif, Windows and now, UNIX-based character terminals. NewEra is unique in it ability to support application deployment for mixed (terminal, PC, UNIX workstation) environments. This flexibility will benefit companies that are evolving from terminals to PCs on desktops. -- Master/Detail - NewEra's added capability to automatically create and define complex master/detail relationships within the Window Painter between SQL database tables benefits customers since the developer does not need to write the code to process one-to-many relationships. Developers save time and effort in coding these relationships themselvesQincreasing developer productivity and speeding-up prototyping substantially. -- FrameWorks Class Library - This class library has been incorporated into NewEra to address customers' rapid application development needs. The FrameWorksClass Library provides a collection of pre-defined classes and objects, such as buttons, and pull-down menu items, designed to automate NewEra's basic GUI-building application functions. Customers save valuable time and effort by using these essential GUI elements which shorten prototyping development time substantially. -- Business Graphics Class Library - Informix has added a Business Graphics Class Library for the NewEra environment, enabling developer use of over 20 pre-defined graphics such as 2D, 3D, contour and pie charts, as well as a variety of advanced drawing tools. With the Business Graphics Class Library, end users can then view, analyze and present their data more effectively. -- Visual Object Reuse - With Visual Object Reuse, objects previously developed for other applications can now more readily be reused by other development teams, without writing any new code. Visual Object Reuse increases developer productivity, and makes NewEra applications easier to maintain over time. -- Windows Dynamic Link Libraries - NewEra now supports multiple Windows-based dynamic link libraries (DLLs). Splitting a NewEra application into multiple DLLs reduces or minimizes application runtime memory requirements. This allows very large enterprise applications to run within a PC-based Windows environment; therefore, lowering the cost of deploying enterprise applications on PC systems. -- Global Language Support - Version 2.0 has been extended to support the development of NewEra applications that target the Asian market. NewEra comes complete with a suite of productive visual programming tools and supports team-oriented development, all within a client/server-ready package that allows for open connectivity to Informix as well as non-Informix relational databases. INFORMIX-NewEra Partner Support NewEra is widely supported by many third-party partners who extend the functionality of NewEra in a variety of technology areas. For example, Intersolv's PVCS configuration management system, allows NewEra development teams to control and coordinate versioning of source code. Cadre, a market-leading CASE tool vendor, supports NewEra in the design and modeling of NewEra applications. (Editors Note: See Informix Announcement "Informix Announces 22 Partner Technologies and Services to Support Application Development With INFORMIX-NewEra," dated July 18, 1995.) NewEra Customers Since its introduction last year, Informix customers have embraced the NewEra environment to create graphical applications for enterprisewide deployment. Current customers include: , AT&T Network Services, British Aerospace Systems and Equipment, Electronic Data Systems, GTE Telephone Operations, Kuwait Petroleum, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, McCaw Cellular, Mobile County Commission, Motorola Semiconductor Product Sector, National Quotation Bureau, Inc., Utah State Courts, and Telstra in Australia. Product Availability INFORMIX-NewEra, version 2.0 is scheduled for availability on the Windows platform in August, 1995. Pricing will be announced at time of shipment. About Informix Informix Software is the 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 Transaction 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 s