New GemFire Features Added To Increase Performance, Flexibility and Scalability Across The Enterprise

Version 2.2 of the GemFire Suite Incorporates Enhanced Functionality Based on The Architecture Needs of Large Financial Services Organizations

Beaverton, Ore.- October 28, 2003 - GemStone Systems today announced the general availability of the GemFire Suite, version 2.2, the industry's leading high performance data services solution. GemFire is a flexible, high performance, cross-platform and cost-effective solution for data distribution, caching and management across the enterprise in real-time. The 2.2 release adds significant new features that continue to increase efficiency and scalability of mission critical enterprise applications, as well as performance improvements.

“The GemFire product is continually improved upon to address the needs of our customers”, said Raj Kulkarni, chief technology officer at GemStone. “The features that have been added to the GemFire Suite, version 2.2, provide increased scalability and performance results for financial services companies that utilize a virtualized data layer for quick decision making. The faster the data can be accessed and distributed, the faster decisions can be made, resulting in larger revenue margins for Wall Street firms.”

GemFire Version 2.2: Enhanced Scalability and Performance

The GemFire solution delivers high performance data distribution and data management benefits and reduces system costs, a top concern for chief architects. GemFire's pervasive interoperability improves the utilization of an enterprise's infrastructure, diminishes development time costs and makes many large technology investments, such as additional hardware, databases and storage, unnecessary.

The GemFire Suite, Version 2.2, features new additions, including dynamic hierarchical caching and support for C/C++ as well as Java processes in the distributed cache. The hierarchical cache configuration directly supports a GemStone customer pilot architecture, in which this leading financial services company needed to distribute real time data that resides in database servers to a high volume of service machines, each servicing a large number of client machines. The overall impact of this architecture change will significantly cut down the traffic to the database servers and on the network, provide better performance consistently and increase database scalability.

A new API has also been introduced providing native cache access to ‘C' applications. This enhancement now allows ‘C' applications to seamlessly share data at high speeds across processes and machine boundaries. GemFire 2.2 manages data in a format that allows for easy interoperability with Java. The use of Java for data services is extremely beneficial as enterprises may manage data via multiple channels, such as through Web services standards to access data as XML. The result for an enterprise is increased scalability as users are able to share data concurrently without over-extending the system.

"There is an unprecedented focus on efficient data management in the securities industry right now, and strong demand for products that remove bottlenecks in data acquisition, management and delivery” said Dushyant Shahrawat, senior analyst at TowerGroup. “Financial firms are constantly evaluating ways to improve data management without considerable restructuring of their current IT environment. Products that can be easily implemented into an institution's existing infrastructure, and quickly allow an organization to not only access data in the system but also distribute it across geographic boundaries in real-time, have a bright future.”

Availability

Version 2.2 of the GemFire Suite is available today. For more information, please visit www.gemstone.com .

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held company with over 20 years of software experience in developing high performance object oriented technology and highly scalable systems for enterprise organizations. GemStone's patented technology delivers the speed, performance and capabilities that enterprises need from the hardware and software they already own. Industry leading global organizations like FirstRand Group, IntercontinentalExchange Inc., JPMorgan Chase, UBS Warburg and BellSouth Telecommunications depend on GemStone technology and expertise to build scalable, mission-critical applications that have set the standard in their industries, and given them the competitive edge to be increasingly profitable.

Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, GemStone sells and supports its solutions through its US sales force and a worldwide network of distributors.