GemFire Enterprise from GemStone Systems Selected by Bear Stearns As a Key Component of Its Data Infrastructure

Beaverton, Oregon and New York, New York, March 8, 2005 - GemStone Systems, a leading data services infrastructure software company, today announced that Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC), a leading global investment banking, securities trading and brokerage firm, has selected GemFire Enterprise for managing in-memory data across its enterprise applications. GemFire is a strategic component of the Bear Stearns non-stop enterprise architecture that will help Bear Stearns achieve a multi-fold increase in trading speeds and volumes, reduce risk computation times, and also have a better picture of risk, pricing and portfolio valuations across multiple asset categories. In the initial phase, GemFire will be deployed as a part of the Program Trading as well as the Global Clearing and Settlement Risk Analytics architectures at Bear Stearns.

By deploying GemFire as an integral part of its infrastructure, Bear Stearns can improve the management of data in multiple formats across several operating environments while further reducing data latency and data bottlenecks.

Bear Stearns chose GemFire Enterprise after a formal evaluation process that included the consideration of proprietary distributed caching and data management products as well as open standards-based offerings. GemFire's stability and ability to outperform competitive products made it a compelling choice for Bear Stearns.

"We were looking for data management technology that would complement our architecture strategy on two fronts," said Peter Cherasia, chief information officer of Bear Stearns. "First, we needed high performance, scalability, and aggregate reliability to match our trading and risk computing cluster. Second, we wanted to efficiently leverage our investment in high performance object-oriented software. The GemFire product exceeded our performance requirements and enabled us to integrate applications without single points of failure or burdensome data transformation."

GemFire Enterprise

GemFire Enterprise provides a pervasive, distributed data fabric for highly available data-on-demand at memory speeds. The GemFire data fabric operates seamlessly on multiple platforms in heterogeneous operating environments with universal language support, which enables data virtualization and transparency of data sources to the consuming applications. GemFire connects to databases, application stores, analytical tools, messaging systems, and mainframes, enabling the deployment of high-performance service-oriented architectures at significantly lower costs.

"GemFire becomes a key component of Bear Stearns' risk infrastructure as their underlying data fabric for risk management. GemStone's goal is to help Bear Stearns significantly improve operational efficiencies, customer service and profitability," said Richard Lamb, president at GemStone Systems. "With GemFire, Bear Stearns can efficiently manage significantly large volumes of data, which need to be manipulated to run risk calculations regardless of the location of the application. This provides increased scalability and business continuity through effective load-balancing of data resources."

About Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc.

Founded in 1923, The Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE: BSC ) is the parent company of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. With approximately $46.1 billion in total capital, Bear Stearns serves governments, corporations, institutions and individuals worldwide. The company's business includes corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions, institutional equities and fixed income sales, trading and research, private client services, derivatives, foreign exchange and futures sales and trading, asset management and custody services. Through Bear, Stearns Securities Corp., it offers financing, securities lending, clearing and technology solutions to hedge funds, broker-dealers and investment advisors. Headquartered in New York City , the company has approximately 11,000 employees worldwide. For additional information about Bear Stearns, please visit the firm's Web site at http://www.bearstearns.com .

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held infrastructure software company that provides data services solutions for enterprise business architects and data infrastructure managers that are building, enhancing or simplifying access, distribution, integration and management of information within and across the enterprise. Founded in 1982, and with over 200 installed customers, GemStone is recognized worldwide for its unique competency and patented technology in object management, virtual memory architectures, high-performance caching, and data distribution technologies.