Open SOA Collaboration Chooses OASIS to Advance SCA and SDO Specifications

Sydney — 27 March 2007 — Eighteen leading technology vendors focused on driving technology initiatives supporting the creation of industry standards around service oriented architectures (SOA), today announced that key Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications have completed incubation and will be formally submitted to OASIS for advancement through its open standards process. The SCA specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and composition of services, critical to building applications using services based on an SOA approach. With these SCA specifications now mature, the partners intend to turn over their standardization process to OASIS. Additionally, the partners have completed work on the SDO specifications, designed to enable uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats, and will turn over stewardship of SDO/Java work to the Java Community Process and non-Java (C++) work to OASIS.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organisations to more easily create new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform. Both are technologies designed to simplify the representation of business logic and business data. Early customers are already implementing and gaining value.

“We applaud the Open SOA Collaboration for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process,” said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. “We look forward to furthering the evolution of SCA from specifications to standards and to promoting the broadest possible industry adoption through education and implementation efforts.”

Since November 2005, 18 companies have joined the effort to work on new industry specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development. Partner companies include BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siemens AG, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, and Xcalia. Together, these companies have achieved significant progress around SCA and SDO specifications.

“OASIS’ guidance brings SCA and SDO one major step closer to becoming the industry standard for service-oriented architectures. Sybase is proud to have been a part of achieving this milestone. The advantage customers will gain from SOA affords Sybase the extraordinary opportunity to provide intelligent data and mobility services,” said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of product management and marketing, Sybase, Inc. “SCA and SDO help open the door to a rich, more adaptive future for information technology.”

The partners will continue to incubate and drive technology initiatives focused on simplifying SOA application development. Additionally, the group’s vendor-neutral Web site (www.OSOA.org) will continue to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications and white papers, and provide a forum for industry input and feedback.

About Sybase

Sybase, Inc. (NYSE: SY) is the largest global enterprise software company exclusively focused on managing information from the data centre to the point of action. Sybase provides open, cross-platform solutions that securely deliver information any time, anywhere, enabling customers to create an information edge. The world’s most critical data in commerce, communications, finance, government and healthcare runs on Sybase. For more information, visit the Sybase Web site: http://www.sybase.com.au or http://www.sybase.co.nz.

About OASIS

OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. The consortium produces more Web services standards than any other organisation along with standards for security, e-business, and standardisation efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organisations and individual members in 100 countries. For more information, visit www.oasis-open.org.

About Open SOA

The Open SOA Collaboration represents an informal group of industry leaders that share a common interest: defining a language-neutral programming model that meets the needs of enterprise developers who are developing software that exploits Service Oriented Architecture characteristics and benefits. The Collaboration is not a Standards Body; it is a set of vendors who wish to innovate rapidly in the development of this programming model and to deliver Specifications to the community for implementation. These specifications are made available to the community on a Royalty Free basis for the creation of compatible implementations. When mature, the intent is to hand these specifications over to a suitable Standards Body for future shepherding. For more information, visit www.osoa.org.

For media enquiries contact:  Lucy Tildesley, Marketing Manager Sybase ANZ, +612 9936 8827 or lucy.tildesley@sybase.com; or Ry Crozier, Lewis PR, +612 9409 3100, or ryc@lewispr.com.