Yesterday at the Java Internet Business Expo, Sybase, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYBS) announced its support for a new World Wide Web protocol to improve the performance of corporate intranets and the Internet. The HTTP Distribution and Replication Protocol (DRP) -- jointly proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by Marimba, Inc., Netscape Communications Corp., Sun Microsystems, Inc., Novell, Inc., and other leading technology companies -- will provide a standardized, efficient infrastructure for automatically distributing Java applications and content over the Web. Sybase's support for this protocol will help its customers improve the efficiency of their networks by decreasing traffic associated with software updates.

"As more and more companies rely on transactional, customer-centric applications written in Java(TM), they need simple and efficient ways to keep those applications updated," said David Yach, Vice President and Chief Architect, Sybase, Inc. "DRP makes the update process transparent to users while also conserving network bandwidth. Sybase is very pleased to support a new protocol that will lower costs for our customers and increase the performance of the Internet."

The DRP enhancement to HTTP uses an efficient, advanced process to automatically revise only the parts of a file or Java-based application that have changed since the last update. Sybase offers a comprehensive suite of products for developing and deploying enterprise Java applications, including the PowerJ™ Java development tool, the Jaguar CTS™ component transaction server, and its data access tool, jConnect™ for JDBC™. Sybase's support for DRP in these and other solutions will enable companies to automatically update their mission-critical applications, ensuring that users will always have the latest versions and helping lower the costs of network administration.

About Sybase

Headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., Sybase, Inc. is a worldwide leader in distributed, open computing solutions with record revenues in 1996 of over $1 billion. The company provides customers and partners with software and services to create business solutions for strategic, competitive advantage. These high-performance, end-to-end solutions encompass client/server, Internet and intranet transaction processing and data mart and data warehousing applications. The company's Adaptive Component Architecture enables rapid design, development and deployment of distributed multi-tier business applications. The company's product lines include Sybase high-performance database servers, Enterprise Connect™ distributed data access and connectivity products and Powersoft(R) enterprise application development tools. The company's Internet addresses are http://www.sybase.com and http://www.powersoft.com.

Source: Sybase, Inc.