ISG NAVIGATOR GAINS SUPPORT AMONG FORTUNE 1000 CUSTOMERS; Broad Adoption of ISG Navigator Universal Data Access Software Achieved

Business Wire, Jan 28, 1998

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 28, 1998--ISG International Software Group Ltd. (NASDAQ NMS:SISGF) today announced an increase in new customer adoption of ISG Navigator and Microsoft's Universal Data Access strategy. ISG was one of the first vendors to support Microsoft's ADO standard and OLE DB specification for Universal Data Access. Microsoft utilizes ADO and OLE DB in its client/server and Internet tools, including Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++ and Internet Information Server. The adoption of ISG Navigator by a growing number of major corporations indicates market acceptance of ADO and OLE DB, and ISG Navigator -- the premier, award-winning and most advanced implementation of Microsoft's Universal Data Access strategy -- and confirms the performance and productivity advantages provided by these technologies.

During the last year, major customers such as MediaOne, DuPont, LAM Research, FMC, 3M Company, Moore Products, Dow Jones Markets, Perrier America, EG&G, Reynolds+Reynolds, and Griffith Labs enthusiastically adopted ISG Navigator. Several are customers of Digital Equipment Corporation, ISG's alliance partner and reseller of ISG Navigator. These ISG customers have implemented departmental projects, each of which serves as a proving ground for broad corporate deployment of ISG Navigator during 1998 and beyond.

"OLE DB will begin to eclipse ODBC as the universal data access middleware protocol for new-age applications," said Nicholas Gall, META Group program director, Open Computing & Server Strategies. "With the help of commercially successful products that implement Universal Database Access within the OLE DB standard and the impetus of Web technology, OLE DB will become the dominant data access method."

"We are excited about the growing market acceptance of ISG Navigator," said Arie Gonen, ISG's CEO and chairman. "Our customers have created demanding Internet and Intranet applications across multiple systems that support improved customer service and simply make possible desktop access to essential non-relational data. This acceptance of our product, and its unique capabilities for Universal Data Access, is very encouraging. We are confident that our product enables new classes of killer applications that have previously been impractical, and the growing evidence of this will bring ISG Navigator into mainstream utilization for knowledge management, decision support, Internet commerce and other rapid-growth market segments."

"At the Brockton/West Roxbury VA Hospital, our staff uses a variety of Web browsers to read and write to NUMA, CareVue, and DHCP medical records on Windows NT, UNIX and OpenVMS systems at three different facilities," said Craig Miller, VA Clinical Information specialist. "ISG Navigator is ideal for organizations that wish to access and unify contemporary and legacy data."

"ISG Navigator is the enabling technology for Lam Research Corporation's worldwide, real-time Technical Support Center," said Mary Raftery, Lam IT Applications manager. "It links our field service call tracking system on a Windows NT SQL Server to CA-MANMAN application functions on DEC Alpha OpenVMS systems. ISG Navigator provides a standard way to read and write to DBMS, without requiring custom development."

"At Moore Products Company, we use ISG Navigator to develop PC-client applications that draw from our ERP systems, including MAPICS in Canada and the UK, SYMIX at the Measurement Systems division and CA-MANMAN at headquarters," said Jeffrey C. Richards, Moore manager of MIS. "ISG Navigator allows us to surround our ERP functions with the latest data access capabilities, leveraging our Microsoft tools and extending our investment in enterprise data."

ISG Navigator is available from ISG at http://www.isgsoft.com and through partners including Computer Associates, Digital Equipment Corporation, Mitsui, SunGard Shareholder Systems Inc. and Tandem. A 10-user license for several Unix databases connected to Windows NT begins at $5,000. ISG Navigator supports a broad base of platforms including Windows 95 and Windows NT, HP/UX, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Digital UNIX, Digital OpenVMS and Alpha NT. ISG Navigator also supports a wide range of databases including Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB2, RMS, OpenIngres, Jasmine, Rdb, ADABAS, ISAM, MUMPS, Codasyl DBMS and Tandem NonStop. For Intranet, Web, Internet, client/server and other enterprise data access environments, ISG Navigator delivers performance and access impractical to achieve otherwise.

ISG ISG (NASDAQ NMS: SISGF) is the leading provider of Universal Data Access software based on Microsoft's OLE DB standard and standards-based (OLE DB, ODBC, ADO, JDBC) products. ISG products are available on multiple platforms and provide simultaneous database-independent access to many databases and file systems. ISG has sales and support offices in the United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Australia and full-service distributors in France and Japan. For more information, visit ISG's Web site at http://www.isgsoft.com.