MERANT Helps Spearhead Open Environment Development With Eclipse.org Board Membership; MERANT PVCS Enterprise Change Management Suite Supports Eclipse Platform

Business Wire, Nov 29, 2001

Business Editors

HILLSBORO, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 29, 2001

MERANT (NASDAQ:MRNT; LSE:MRN), a leader in enterprise change management (ECM), today joined industry leaders to introduce Eclipse.org, an open community of development tools providers.

A member of the Eclipse.org board of directors and a founding partner with IBM, MERANT strengthened its commitment to open development environments by contributing to Eclipse.org open source technology and by integrating the PVCS Enterprise Change Management suite of products to IBM's WebSphere Studio Workbench(TM), which is based on Eclipse.org technology.

By building upon its long-standing commitment to offer customers' "best of breed" tools and technologies as well as product suites that are compatible with existing products from other ISVs, MERANT is continuing its approach to provide customers with freedom of choice. In following this flexible approach, customers can spend less time integrating and more time innovating for leading platforms such as WebSphere, thus accelerating the deployment of e-business applications.

"As Eclipse.org forms, the participation from industry leaders like MERANT is very important," said Skip McGaughey, interim chairman of the Eclipse.org board of directors. "MERANT's PVCS client workstation plug-in helps developers efficiently move to the Eclipse Platform, quickly allowing them access to the broad range of integrated plug-in tools without interfering with their existing repository."

The PVCS ECM solution provides a scaleable, process-driven approach to automate change across development and web environments, enabling enterprises to focus on continuously delivering improved applications and sites while leveraging technology change. The interoperability between the PVCS suite of products and other tools compatible with the Eclipse.org platform empowers developers to assemble customized plug-and-play open development environments including an integrated ECM solution. Developers using an Eclipse.org-based environment will benefit from flexible upgrading of development tools as released by participating vendors - without compatibility issues among new and existing tools.

"The Eclipse platform is truly unique in that it allows customers to independently develop applications with best-of-breed technology, without worrying about compatibility," said Andrew Weiss, chief technology office, MERANT. "IBM's commitment to open source by contributing the Eclipse platform and using it as a foundation for all strategic IBM application development products is a giant step in the development of open environments. MERANT's continuing support of open development environments is consistent with the strategy that has driven the PVCS product suite over the years - to empower customers to manage development in as cost-effective and simplified manner as possible."

Offering increased productivity, optimal control and fast delivery, MERANT PVCS enables effective, efficient ECM for everyone within an organization - from the CIO to development managers; and from development and web teams to business managers. MERANT PVCS provides the broadest coverage of organizations' digital assets, including software, applications and content across desktops, work stations, mainframe and network; unsurpassed scalability, deployable from the smallest team to the largest enterprise, from simple to complex applications and web sites; and end-to-end change management, managing all the change processes required in today's environment such as version management, content management, issue management, workflow and process management and multiple corollary processes.

Pricing & Availability

The Eclipse Platform is available immediately without charge to members of the Eclipse.org community. The complete platform, including white papers, examples, documentation and components in open source, is available for download from: http://www.eclipse.org.

About MERANT

With over 25 years of experience, MERANT helps customers at over 30,000 sites worldwide, including the majority of the Global 2000, improve their ability to manage change to enterprise digital assets - applications, code and content. Delivering the broadest coverage of digital assets, unsurpassed scalability and end-to-end change management, MERANT PVCS is the comprehensive enterprise change management platform customers use to make change a competitive advantage. For additional information, visit www.merant.com.

About Eclipse.org

Eclipse.org is an open consortium of software development tool vendors that has formed a community interested in collaborating to create better development environments and product integration. The community shares an interest in creating products that are inter-operable in an easy to use way based upon plug-in technology. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, tool vendors can concentrate on their areas of expertise and the creation of new development technology. Full details of the Eclipse.org community and the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org. The Eclipse Platform is available for commercial use through Eclipse.org's Common Public License. This provides royalty free access to the source code and includes worldwide re-distribution rights and the right to create derivative works. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java(TM) language, and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples including a fully operational "Java Development Tooling" package. The Eclipse Platform has already been deployed on a range of workstation environments including Linux(R) and Windows(TM) based platforms.