Bluestone's Sapphire/Web Release 5 Leads the Way for Enterprise Web Application Server

Business Wire, March 16, 1998

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 16, 1998--

Achieves New Industry Milestones for Enterprise Interaction

Management, Scalability, and System Reporting and Control

Bluestone Software Inc., technology leader of the emerging enterprise-to-web solutions market, announced Monday Sapphire/Web(r) Release 5 -- the most powerful, secure and manageable Web application server framework in the world.

The product has been significantly extended and restructured into a five-part product family including the core Sapphire/Universal Business Server, Sapphire/Application Manager, the well known Sapphire/Developer, Sapphire/Enterprise Deployment Kit, and Sapphire/Integration Modules for native data integration. All will be fully available in April, 1998. Release 5 will be priced according to Bluestone's ground-breaking "pay-per-usage" model tied to the volume of server interactions--the best paradigm for the web-network era.

"Bluestone has driven a stake in the ground by introducing this new pricing paradigm," said Philip Costa, industry analyst with Giga Information Group. "By charging customers for only the capacity they use, not the hardware, they have moved beyond the technology-centric model to a business-centric model."

"The thought of concurrent-user pricing, or CPU-based or even run-time pricing is all wrong for the new web environment," said Mel Baiada, Bluestone CEO. "The only true value to a web-enabled application is when that application is accessed--when it interacts with the user. Once you get that the interaction is the real unit of work, then you understand what we mean when we say we are in the business of 'enterprise interaction management.' Our product modules deliver everything enterprises need to optimize their business by leveraging the web."

Market: Integrating Enterprise Legacy with the Web

A February, 1998 study by Datamonitor Report examining the integration of enterprise legacy infrastructure with intranets and the web at large stated, "Driving this market will be the fierce need to leverage existing legacy investments while extending functionality to a broader user base in a simple, efficient format. Torrid growth rates ranging from 60%-100% will bring the total web/legacy opportunity to roughly $14.7bn by 2002 as extending legacy information to the web becomes the singular focus of corporate information technology."

"As information flow through web-extended networks becomes the lifeblood of enterprises, essential services that deploy and manage applications in the web environment will become the heart of the enterprise information system," said John H. Capobianco, Bluestone Software senior vice president, marketing. "Business optimization will occur as the enterprise leverages its web-network position, allowing companies to increase speed to market and reach customers and partners less expensively, in more individually tailored, high-quality interactions."

"Web-server" products enable hardware servers to host web interfaces and applications. Bluestone's Sapphire/Web complements web servers by providing a framework that enables the smooth integration of an enterprise's existing business applications with the web environment. Sapphire/Web provides a smart management environment that lets IS managers monitor and control application functioning, and powerful development environments for building custom integrations, as well as new web applications. All of these services and more are included in Bluestone's focus of Enterprise Interaction Management.

Product Vision Realized

"Our Sapphire/Web framework is the ideal answer to the enterprise's real needs," said Bob Bickel, Bluestone senior vice president. "Only Sapphire/Web offers unlimited scalability, distributed load balancing combined with central-point control, the ability to automatically find and 'bind' the software objects in a network, native legacy-data integration, and much more."

Sapphire/Web's purpose is to enable enterprises to optimize business by leveraging the web. It is architected to be the open, business-application "hub" of a web-centric network. Designed for large scale environments, the framework:

-- enables the direct back-end integration of any legacy application,

in its native language;

-- allows distributed, real-time, load balancing, yet allows

central-point control;

-- can run applications in separate partitions for security and

stability;

-- deploys applications in Java(tm) for hardware platform independence;

-- includes a comprehensive management console, reports and services;

-- enables rapid application development for speed to market;

-- can integrate any front-end Web client or user-interface environment,

and applications built in any business-standard software language.

Release 5

With Release 5, the Sapphire/Web framework has been deepened, broadened and reorganized into a five-part product family including the core Sapphire/Universal Business Server (UBS), the Sapphire/Application Manager (SAM), the powerful Sapphire/Developer environment, and the Sapphire/Enterprise Deployment Kit (EDK) which can be used to create Sapphire/Integration Modules (SIMs). Initial training is included and required with all product configurations. The entire product line will be fully available in April 1998, with additional SIMs modules being delivered on a continual basis.