CA PROVIDES APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT WITH DIRECT DATABASE ACCESS TO CA-INGRES, ORACLE, MICROSOFT SQL SERVER AND SYBASE; Drivers Bundled With CA-OpenROAD At No Extra Cost; Clients Save 60 Percent Over Individual Purchases

Business Wire, Jan 17, 1995

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--January 17, 1995--Fulfilling its promise to deliver client/server freedom of choice by providing direct access to all major relational databases, Computer Associates today began shipping database drivers for its multi-platform application development product, CA-OpenROAD. Drivers include full, integrated support for CA-Ingres, Oracle, Microsoft SQL/Server and Sybase databases.

"This unprecedented freedom of choice is what openness is all about," said Alan Paller, CA director of open systems. "Thousands of corporate developers and value-added resellers can now take the applications they've built and extend them across multiple platforms with multiple user interfaces and databases." Developers can now create new database-independent applications in the CA-OpenROAD environment or deploy existing CA-Windows 4GL applications against CA-Ingres, Oracle, Microsoft SQL/Server and Sybase. The application is developed once and then deployed on different platforms against multiple databases without changes to the application itself, providing users with unequaled portability and lower implementation costs.

"CA-OpenROAD transparently exploits sophisticated database features, insulating the developer from differences among important but not standardized SQL extensions," said Paller. Built around a full-function repository, CA-OpenROAD is the new version of the highly-regarded Windows 4GL graphical and object-oriented application development tool.

Pricing

In a move designed to radically lower the cost of application development, CA has bundled these new database drivers as part of the CA-OpenROAD Success Pack, with pricing at $420 per user for a 16-user license on Windows NT. In addition to the database drivers, the Success Pack includes the CA-Ingres/Net software that transparently ties PCs to servers, a pre-compiler, and a query and reporting tool for end-users. The Success Pack is aggressively priced at more than 60 percent below what users would have paid for the individual components.

Client and Analyst Reaction

Dave Phelan, vice president, ADAGE Systems International, Inc., Westport, CT: "We have been waiting for something like this for a long time. The new version of CA-OpenROAD allows us to deliver our products on multiple databases so that clients who like the mission-critical strength of CA-Ingres can have that and clients who are in the Windows camp can use SQL/Server. Additionally, our users can choose Windows or X-Windows user interfaces. This offers us a competitive advantage over the other multinational Enterprise Resource Planning vendors."

Wayne Kernochan, director, commercial systems research, Aberdeen Group, Boston: "Native drivers such as the ones supplied for CA-OpenROAD are increasingly critical in delivering performance for medium to high-scale applications in Fortune 1000 organizations. Aberdeen finds that most Fortune 1000 organizations now use RDBMSs from multiple suppliers and that these organizations need to leverage these RDBMSs by allowing users to access more than one of them at a time. Native drivers such as CA-OpenROAD's have proven critical to delivering the performance that medium-to-large scale enterprises need in these situations."

Shaku Atre, president of Atre Associates in Rye, NY: "The real spirit of openness is interoperability. A number of vendors talk about it, but only supply ODBC connections, which force the customers to pay the price in performance. CA seems to be one of the exceptions. They are offering solutions for interoperability with native drivers to provide solutions for customers' mission-critical problems in an efficient and effective way."

From desktop to mainframe, Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA) leads the world in client/server software. Guided by CA90s open architecture, 8,000 dedicated employees in 30 countries develop, license and support more than 300 integrated products that include systems and database management, application development, financial and manufacturing applications and consumer solutions. The world's major industrial, government and research organizations depend on CA, whose fiscal 1994 revenues exceeded $2.1 billion.

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CONTACT: Computer Associates International Inc.

Bob Gordon, 516/342-2391