ITTIA and SNL Securities to Jointly Promote Ittialogy Solution for Financial Data Access

October 15, 2001 — Bellevue, WA — ITTIA and SNL Securities have formed a partnership to promote ITTIA's Ittialogy data access technology to SNL Securities customers using its flagship financial information and analysis software. The companies entered the partnership to meet the needs of SNL Securities DataSource users who require more sophisticated data access and analysis via third party tools and custom applications.

SNL Securities gathers timely financial information on institutions in the financial services and energy sectors, and resells this data to research institutions, consultants, ratings agencies and investment firms in its DataSource Products line. Customers receive an SNL Securities application that provides a wide range of functionality, along with data stored in an RDM database.

However, RDM's proprietary data access language has made it impossible for users to design new queries or to transfer data from the DataSource Products software to other applications via the industry standard ODBC or SQL formats.

While SNL Securities' application provided connectivity to Microsoft Excel, the lack of ODBC and SQL interfaces was a problem for customers who preferred to transfer data directly to SQL databases for cataloging or analysis, or who wanted to build custom data mining applications.

These users had to either obtain the RDM toolkit from a vendor, learn the proprietary C language interface and write their own access code, or do without sharing the data, said Steve Ferguson, DataSource Products director.

But the ODBC driver from ITTIA's Ittialogy embedded data management product line unlocks information in the RDM database, opening SNL Securities' DataSource Products to a wide variety of SQL- and ODBC-supporting querying tools and third-party applications. The RDMi^TM interface takes advantage of performance-enhancing RDM features such as the record-level API and combined network/b-tree database models, delivering data with the efficiency associated with such databases.

"ITTIA's RDMi will save time and labor for SNL's customers engaging in sophisticated, custom analysis that requires direct access to our databases. We are excited to promote this tool to our clients," Ferguson said. He also praised ITTIA's willingness to work with his company in developing RDMi^TM's performance and capabilities, and the quality of its ongoing support.

"ITTIA is delighted to offer a solution based on Ittialogy technology to such a respected firm in the financial sector. For ITTIA, SNL Securities is an ideal partner: an industry-leading software and data provider that cares greatly about customer satisfaction, and will cooperate to deliver the solutions that best meet users' needs. We look forward to working closely with SNL Securities, and to delivering better, faster and more cost effective solutions to all our customers," said ITTIA President and CEO Sasan Montaseri.

About ITTIA
Founded in February 2000, ITTIA provides solutions for embedded data management, information mobilization, and data integration. The company provides easy access for businesses that need critical information immediately, from traditional PCs, Web clients and emerging mobile devices. ITTIA experts offer experience with various embedded databases and provide services including database design, application development, performance optimization and tuning, design reviews and mobile platform selection. For more information, please visit www.ittia.com.

About RDMi^TM

The RDMi^TM ODBC driver provides an industry-standard programming interface for accessing the full power of RDM. RDMi^TM enables popular database tools as Crystal Reports and Cognos to extend the capabilities of RDM. In addition, with RDMi^TM, a RDM database becomes an available data source for ADO and OLE DB through Microsoft's ODBC provider for OLE DB.

For application end-users, RDMi^TM opens RDM to the world of database interoperability. For companies with RDM-based applications, RDMi^TM provides an opportunity to add value when customers demand open access to the application data: there is no need to switch databases or implement a replication scheme when use of RDMi^TM provides a more time- and cost-effective solution. RDMi^TM's ability to open the database offers increased benefits from an RDM-based application, and thus is an aid to securing new customers and increasing revenue.

RDMi^TM is available in read-only, read-write, single-user and multi-user implementations. Because RDMi^TM is a comprehensive implementation of the ODBC 3.0 specification, it supports the complete range of complex queries: expressions, aggregation, filters, and ordering. RDMi^TM will exploit network model sets for optimal join processing, and make use of keys for more efficient filters and ordering.

About SNL Securities

SNL Securities (www.snl.com) is the leading research and information provider focusing on the banking, insurance, real estate, specialized financial services and energy sectors. With a comprehensive suite of database products, Internet applications, electronic newsletters, monthly journals, and quarterly and annual data digests, SNL provides the information required to invest in, evaluate and keep abreast of the financial services, real estate and energy sectors.

For more information, please visit www.ittia.com.

* Birdstep RDM Embedded ™, RDM™, Raima™, db.vista™, and Velocis ™ are trademarks of Birdstep Technology Inc.