Inprise CEO Sees Application Server Emerging As Dominant Enterprise Computing Model

Business Wire, August 10, 1998

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 10, 1998--

Company To Detail Application Server Strategy;

Will Make Significant Corporate, Partner, and Customer Announcements at This Week's Annual User Conference, ICON '98

In a major address to more than 3,000 attendees of its ninth annual user conference, ICON '98, Inprise Corporation's (Nasdaq: INPR) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Delbert W. Yocam said the company's new enterprise application server will enable a new era in computing whose impact will far surpass relational databases as they exist today.

The application server will fast become the dominant enterprise computing model in the late '90s and early 21st century, according to Yocam. "We believe this is as sweeping a change to the information technology environment as the widespread adoption of the relational database in the early '80s," Yocam said. "I believe by the year 2000, the enterprise application server will be the dominant computing model -- and I believe that Inprise will be a major provider of these enterprise application servers," he said.

Yocam said the integration of the enterprise has emerged as a critical issue for organizations in all business sectors striving to maintain competitive advantage. He noted that the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web is changing the competitive landscape of nearly all business sectors -- from retail to financial services.

"Integration is the key to IT success. It is the key to unlocking information and making it available to any user, anywhere, anytime. Inprise's mission is to help companies integrate their enterprises for competitive gain. Our technology allows customers to connect disparate systems, provide greater access to information, and to link employees, partners, and customers," he said.

"The combination of more data, more users, more systems, and more applications, compounded by a lack of time and resources, has contributed to a crisis of complexity for IT organizations. These organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver bottom-line benefits to their users," he added.

Yocam said maintaining and extending existing enterprise applications has become a daunting challenge for IT organizations. Ironically, he added, "Enterprise applications have become a bottleneck for organizations rather than an enabling technology." Yocam said he believes Inprise will succeed in the application server space because of its ability to provide customers with a unique combination of leading development environments, scalable middleware, and application management capabilities. "We are the only platform-neutral application server vendor with a leadership position in both Java and CORBA - the emerging standards for integrating the heterogeneous enterprise," he added.

Announced in April, Yocam said the Inprise Application Server is on track for delivery later this year. It will allow businesses to fully exploit the benefits of the new distributed object computing paradigm by radically simplifying the development and management of distributed multi-tier enterprise applications.

"By simplifying the enterprise software architecture, we are helping companies to create information systems that integrate with legacy systems, can be built and brought to market faster, and provide flexibility for growth and rapid change," he added.

Yocam said Inprise is working with companies in a wide range of market sectors -- from major financial services firms such as Charles Schwab & Co. and Nations Bank to telecommunications giants such as MCI and AT&T -- to provide time-to-market advantage and bottom-line results. Inprise recently helped BellCore, one of the world's largest telecommunications innovators, to dramatically reduce the time-to-market for the development and deployment of next-generation enterprise applications.

State of the Company

Nineteen months after embarking upon a major turnaround and refocusing the company on enterprise computing, Yocam told more than 3,000 information technology professionals that the company is poised for growth in the coming year. Inprise has experienced a substantial increase in sales of its enterprise offerings, with sales of its client/server, Internet/intranet and enterprise-level products and services constituting 73 percent of total revenue in the second fiscal quarter of 1998. Yocam said sales of the company's VisiBroker middleware increased 58 percent in the second quarter of 1998 compared with prior year sales.

Despite the impact of the Asian financial crisis, Yocam said Inprise's turnaround continues. "Today, we are a growing and profitable company with a new mission, a new focus, and an exciting future," he said.

Yocam said the past 12 months have represented a period of substantial change and growth. Efforts to prepare the company to better service enterprise customers have been extremely successful. In February, the company announced the successful acquisition of Visigenic Software, a leading supplier of object technology and provider of the VisiBroker object request broker, the industry's leading CORBA ORB technology. In April, the company announced it was changing its name from Borland International to Inprise Corporation. The name change reflects the company's transition from a developer of desktop software applications to a leading vendor in the growing corporate market for products and services used to build and manage large-scale enterprise software systems.