Responding to the overwhelming interest in the development of application cartridges, Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq NNM: ORCL) today announced the first round of winners for the Cartridge Development Award Program, a contest designed to reward innovation in building application cartridges for Oracle Web Application Server, a key component of Network Computing Architecture(TM) (NCA). The Cartridge Development Award Program helps encourage creativity in the development of application cartridges in key areas that are enabled by the new era of network computing, including education, multimedia, electronic commerce, development tools and legacy application integration.

The winners selected for the first round are: Bien Logic, LanMinds, SAQQARA Systems, Sirrus and WayFarer. Each has been awarded an engineering prize for developing a unique design of an application cartridge.

"These awards target innovative developers who may get overlooked in the wave of higher-profile companies introducing new cartridges for the Internet," said Beatriz Infante, senior vice president Internet and media products at Oracle Corp. "By giving our third-party cartridge developers the visibility they need to push their technology to market, Oracle is ensuring that valuable ideas are converted into viable products."

About the Companies

Bien Logic's SurfReport cartridge enables marketing managers to meet the challenges posed by the Internet in maintaining corporate standards, leveraging existing assets, cost-effectively migrating to new technologies while managing development processes, diverse user constituencies and distributed resources.

LanMinds, administrator of the FAM Top Level Domain (TLD), is developing Eminent Domain(TM), a cartridge-based solution for the emerging TLD marketplace. This cartridge will allow Internet Service Providers to easily manage new TLD names.

SAQQARA's Step Search(TM) Enterprise is a complete Internet catalog authoring and publishing system selected and deployed by Fortune 500 companies for its innovative parametric search technology, open database architecture and powerful Web-based authoring system. The Step Search(TM) Enterprise cartridge will integrate this functionality with the Oracle Web Application Server.

Sirrus Internet Solutions' IntelliSite Security Architecture (ISA), brings single sign-on and centralized access control to distributed Web, CORBA and Java Enterprise applications. This cartridge will provide these security features to NCA installations.

Wayfarer's INCISA cartridge will provide a real-time "push" for corporate intranet data and news-alerting individuals or groups about updates and events from Oracle and other intranet applications as well as from public Internet sources.

The contest will continue to respond to the broadening interest in developing cartridges for the Web Application Server with new winners throughout April and May. Awards consist of cash, software and marketing support. The final deadline for submissions is May 9, 1997. For further information on how to apply, go to http://www.oracle.com/nca/csnfund/.

Network Computing Architecture is the productization of Oracle's vision for network computing, allowing any Network Computer, PC or other client device to interact with any Web server, application server or database server over any network. The platform enables all of these software components to communicate in a mission-critical environment that offers optimal performance, scalability, security, availability and reliability.

Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest software company. With annual revenues exceeding $5.2 billion, the company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education and support services, in more than 90 countries around the world.

SOURCE Oracle Corp.