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October 16, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES GROUP MAKES UDI ON LINUX RELEASE AVAILABLE

Software Technologies Group (www.stg.com) has made available the first public release of the UDI environment for the Red Hat Linux and Caldera OpenLinux operating systems. Downloadable at www.stg.com/udi, this code provides early access to UDI technology on the Linux operating system for Intel platforms. Software Technologies Group is a member of Project UDI (www.project-udi.org), the multi-company group specifying and developing UDI technology, and is specifically developing the UDI environment for Linux.

While this early access release is a binary release, Project UDI has made a public commitment to releasing the source code for the reference implementation as open source in the near future.

This early access release includes the UDI environment itself as well as several sample drivers for hardware such as the Osicom 2300 network interface card and the DPT SmartCACHE and SmartRAID families of SCSI controllers. STG is also developing and planning to release a Red Hat driver install disk to allow installation of UDI drivers at boot time to support UDI drivers for devices not otherwise supported by the standard Red Hat distribution. Planned availability for the driver disk is early 4q2000. UDI support for additional Linux platforms such as PowerPC, SPARC, and Alpha are underway and are being released as major milestones are reached.

"As UDI reference releases are made available for more platforms, the value of UDI increases. This helps broaden UDI's exposure and helps to demonstrate the value of using UDI as a driver development platform," said Software Technologies Group President Chris Herzog.

"STG's release marks yet another milestone in Project UDI's development of a specification and publicly available implementations of a Uniform Driver Interface. STG is actively demonstrating and realizing the promise of this new technology," said Kevin Quick, Project UDI chairman.

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. UDI also helps speed time-to-market of new devices, and allows manufacturers to allocate development resources to improving device performance, features, functionality, and quality instead of spending a significant portion of their resources simply trying to adapt their drivers to different platforms and operating systems. UDI allows vendors to leverage their drivers across multiple environments with significantly less effort than in the past, making their devices available on more platforms in less time than ever before. Ongoing support costs are also reduced because UDI compliant drivers are shielded from internal operating system changes as operating system updates are released. So long as a driver complies with the UDI specification, it will continue to operate even across major operating system revisions.

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 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. Project UDI is also sponsoring development and release of a prototype code base which will be made available to the public to facilitate widespread adoption of this technology.

For more information, contact:

Software Technologies Group
Robert Schuricht
708.547.0110 x238
http://www.stg.com

Project UDI
Kevin Quick, Chairman
214.654.5173
http://www.project-udi.org