Stylus Studio Selected as Finalist in the 5th Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards

Market Wire, March, 2005

Stylus Studio (http://www.stylusstudio.com), the industry-leading provider of XML development tools for advanced data integration, won the nomination for Ziff Davis' eWEEK Magazine's 5th Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards. The Stylus Studio® 6 XML Professional Edition nomination for best enterprise productivity application underscores the surging popularity of the Stylus Studio XML IDE in the IT community and is yet another notable testament to its competency and prowess at simplifying all things XML.

The eWEEK Excellence Awards program is the industry's most comprehensive enterprise IT benchmark for assessing products and services that demonstrate innovation and integrate cutting-edge technologies while maintaining strong commitment to helping enterprises address their varied competitive, security and budgetary concerns. Regarding this year's nominees, Peter Coffee, eWEEK Technology Editor, commented, "More than ever before, the Excellence field this year showed that IT vendors are trying to deliver what enterprise professionals need, not just following the least-resistance path of technology progress."

XML Productivity Through Innovation

"The Stylus Studio team's mission is to deliver unprecedented XML productivity through innovation. To this end, we've built the most robust suite of versatile XML editors, debuggers and complementary utilities that collectively take the guesswork out of XML, all at affordable prices," said Carlo Innocenti, Stylus Studio's Program Manager. "But true innovation to us also means looking ahead -- providing technical leadership through new tools and support for promising new technologies like XQuery, which will greatly simplify XML data access and integration tasks in enterprise computing."

About Stylus Studio®

Stylus Studio®, a product from DataDirect Technologies, an operating company of Progress Software Corporation, is the industry's most innovative XML IDE, providing advanced support for XML and its related technologies: XSL, XSLT, XML Schema, DTD, SOAP, WSDL, SQL/XML, XML mapping, and XQuery. Used by leading software developers world-wide, Stylus Studio simplifies XML programming and enhances developer productivity through innovation. For more information, visit http://www.stylusstudio.com.

About DataDirect Technologies(TM)

DataDirect Technologies is focused on standards-based data connectivity, enabling software developers to quickly develop and deploy business applications across all major databases and platforms. DataDirect Technologies offers the most comprehensive, proven line of data connectivity components available anywhere. Developers worldwide at more than 250 leading independent software vendors and thousands of corporate IT departments rely on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC(TM) and ADO.NET. Developers also depend on DataDirect to radically simplify complex data integration projects using XML products based on the emerging XQuery and XQJ standards. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation, a US$300 million global software industry leader. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., DataDirect Technologies can be reached on the Web at http://www.datadirect.com or by phone at 1-800-876-3101.

Stylus Studio is a registered trademark of Progress Software Corporation in the U.S. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

For More Information: Rob Estepe Business Development Manager Stylus Studio Telephone: (781) 280-4488 Email: stylusstudio@stylusstudio.com