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Business Description OVERVIEW We provide software products that enable organizations to build and manage e-business applications and their underlying databases. Our suite of products allows customers to manage the database life cycle, which is the process of creating, deploying and enhancing databases in response to evolving business and software application requirements. By simplifying the management of the database life cycle, our products allow organizations to rapidly develop and ensure the availability of critical e-business applications. During 1999, we issued more than 12,600 new user licenses and received more than 8,800 maintenance renewals. We have thousands of customers across a range of industries, including technology, telecommunications and financial services. INDUSTRY BACKGROUND In today's highly competitive markets, a growing number of organizations are using the Internet to conduct business electronically. This e-business model has led to the proliferation of new Internet-based, or e-business, software applications. Businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on these e-business applications to run critical parts of their operations and to collect important customer and market information. These applications will continue to gain in strategic importance as organizations seek to access and store an increasing volume of information while providing access to that information to a greater number of users. While the Internet has fundamentally changed how organizations gather, manage and distribute information, it has also presented a new set of business and technology challenges. Given limited IT resources and intense time-to-market pressures, organizations must ensure that the right software applications are designed and built on time and within budget. Organizations must ensure that these applications are up-and-running with optimal performance. Downtime--either scheduled or unplanned--must be kept to an absolute minimum. The Internet allows customers to quickly evaluate and switch to competing products or services, thereby increasing the need for successful application performance. A poorly designed or poorly performing application can have a significant operational and financial impact, such as poor customer service, a reduction in brand equity or significant lost revenue. Software applications for e-business are designed to provide reliable storage and flexible access to critical business information. Databases, which are a proven technology for storing and accessing information, provide the essential infrastructure of e-business applications. Dramatic improvements in the cost and performance of computer hardware and networking technologies are accelerating the proliferation of databases supporting e-business strategies. The proliferation of software applications from Internet and e-business initiatives has increased the demands on databases as organizations face numerous business and technology challenges, including storing massive amounts of customer data, handling increasing numbers of users and utilizing information from disparate systems. Historically, organizations have relied on a combination of highly trained professionals and an assortment of software tools to manage their databases. As e-business applications have proliferated, so have the demands placed on IT professionals who must ensure the availability and performance of the underlying databases. Many organizations struggle to keep pace with the simultaneous pressures to build more applications, support more users and manage more data within increasingly complex computing environments. At the same time, these organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to staff database management positions due to the limited supply of qualified IT professionals. As a result, experienced database administrators and developers are being asked to do more in less time and less experienced IT personnel are being asked to become more proficient at a faster rate. This strain on IT professionals is compounded by the growing complexity of IT systems and the need to be proficient with different types of databases. Traditional software solutions for managing databases do not adequately address the challenges of today's e-business environment. Many of these solutions are designed for expert database administrators and developers and are therefore too complex for less experienced IT personnel. This complexity often prevents users of these solutions from becoming proficient without extensive training. Also, these traditional solutions do not lend themselves to rapid deployment, often requiring a lengthy installation process and extensive configuration. These solutions can end up costing more than the database software they are designed to manage. In many cases, traditional database management solutions operate only on a single type of database, such as Oracle. Since businesses often use databases from several different vendors to support their e-business applications, IT professionals are forced to use a variety of database-specific products to manage this heterogeneous environment. These problems with traditional software solutions typically increase the time between conception and implementation, making it difficult for organizations to rapidly develop applications to meet changing e-business objectives. Most traditional solutions also fail to adequately address the database life cycle. Databases must first be designed and created, then frequently redesigned and enhanced to support changing applications. This database life cycle includes three phases: design, development and administration. The design phase focuses on translating business requirements into technical specifications. The development phase translates these technical specifications into software applications. The administration phase involves concurrently managing these software applications while ensuring their availability, performance, security and recoverability. As business needs change, the process starts over again with the need for new or enhanced applications. Most traditional solutions require users to employ different software products with unique user interfaces and capabilities to address each phase of the database life cycle. As a result, we believe that there is a significant opportunity for a database management solution that meets the demands of the e-business environment. This solution should provide the following benefits: - accelerate time-to-market by allowing users to produce effective work results sooner; - enhance the reliability and availability required of e-business applications; - alleviate the strain on IT resources, especially database professionals; - provide a suite of solutions to manage the database life cycle; and - manage an increasingly diversified and distributed database infrastructure.