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January 25, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

INDUSTRY LEADERS TEST UNIFORM DEVICE DRIVER INTERFACE IMPLEMENTATIONS

Testing validates UDI 1.0 Specification

DALLAS, TX (Jan 25th, 2000) Project UDI today announced the start of the first UDI Interoperability Testing event for products based on the UDI 1.0 specification. This Interoperability Testing is sponsored by Project UDI to validate and enable the broad adoption of UDI technology throughout the industry.

Sometimes known as a Plugfest, this week-long event will allow multiple vendors to test their UDI-based products in conjunction with all other vendors to verify and insure the multi-vendor compatibility of the UDI implementation. Individual systems vendors and IHV's may participate in the open Interoperability testing to insure that this goal has been reached and that customers may rely on UDI to provide truly Universal driver support.

The UDI Specification is designed to provide device driver portability for existing and future system configurations. By developing to a single device driver interface, companies can realize significant savings in device driver development and testing costs. It also helps speed time-to-market of new devices, and allows manufacturers to allocate development resources on improving device performance, features, functionality, and quality.

UDI supports today's key I/O technologies and is designed with an extensible architecture that can easily accommodate future I/O technologies and products. The UDI 1.0 Specification is available from http://www.project-udi.org.

Project UDI is a multi-company open development group dedicated to developing standardized device driver interfaces for the computer I/O technologies of today and tomorrow. More information on Project UDI, may be found at: http://www.project-udi.org/ or by contacting one of the member companies listed below. Project UDI is also sponsoring development of prototype code which will be made available to the public to facilitate widespread adoption of this technology.

More information: http://www.project-udi.org.

Press Contacts:

Compaq:

"Compaq has always been a strong supporter of open standards, like Project UDI, and looks forward to continued progress in this important standard for our customers and partners."

Hewlett-Packard:

"As an active proponent of open standards, HP is pleased to participate in the Project UDI initiative. HP expects that interoperability events like Plugfest will bolster industry awareness and adoption of UDI, facilitating robust, portable, and quicker time-to-market solutions.", Radhika Krishnan, IHV program manager at HP's System Interconnect Solutions Lab.

IBM:

"IBM's participation in the UDI Plugfest reinforces its commitment to the development of open standards and its focus on delivering more robust solutions to customers" said Tilak Agerwala, vice president UNIX marketing and product management, IBM Corporation. "The UDI specification will help provide device driver portability for new devices while reducing development and testing costs for manufacturers. Project UDI also allows world class OS vendors, like IBM, to offer rapid support for a wealth of devices on their platforms. As a strong supporter of open standards, IBM has actively contributed to the development of the UDI specification through its vast expertise in the area of I/O technologies."

Interphase Corporation:

"Interphase is a strong proponent of the UDI specification as evidenced by our active involvement with Project UDI. Interphase believes the industry's adoption of the UDI architecture will lead to more robust and feature-enhanced communications products for the user community with a faster time to market.''

Software Technologies Group, Inc.:

"Many of our customer's products require extensive low level software drivers and the efforts required to maintain a family of products across just multiple releases of a single vendor's operating system can be significant to say nothing of the effort of maintaining products across multiple operating systems - UDI is a big win in terms of time and effort to build these products as well as greatly reduced support efforts; we're behind UDI all the way", Chris Herzog, President, Software Technologies Group, Inc.