DataDirect Technologies to Showcase Next Wave in Data Services at Microsoft Developers Conference

Presentation to Address Data Challenges in SOA at Microsoft Tech-Ed EMEA 2008 in Barcelona

Slough, UK — DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) will be exhibiting at Microsoft Tech-Ed EMEA 2008, taking place at Barcelona’s Centre Convencions Internaticional, 10 – 14 November 2008. In addition, Solutions Architect John de Longa will present “Frontiers in Data Access” on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 from 14:50 to15:10 in theatre two followed by a second presentation Wednesday, 12 November 2005 at 15:20.

Microsoft Tech-Ed EMEA 2008 Developers is the Microsoft premier technical education conference just for developers. For five days, more than 4,000 software professionals will learn about the industry’s newest trends and the latest innovations and technologies from Microsoft.

In his presentation, “Frontiers in Data Access” John de Longa will offer technical insight and valuable advice for enterprise, system and data architects as well as application developers and managers. He will discuss how to improve the scalability and flexibility of data access strategies.

“As more organisations implement service-oriented architectures they find themselves with a multitude of business services that need to access enterprise data – too often data access issues are overlooked until they become a problem,” explains John de Longa. “I’ll be exploring the concept of data services as an emerging approach for addressing data challenges in SOA.”

Data services enhance flexibility and simplify application development by providing a consistent mechanism for accessing, integrating and updating enterprise data, regardless of where it is stored.

For more than 20 years, DataDirect Technologies has provided software architects with premium data access middleware to connect business-critical applications to a wide range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC™, ADO.NET, XQuery and related XML standards. With its deep roots in data access for application developers and the acquisition of Xcalia, a leader in the development and adoption of the Service Data Objects (SDO) and Data Access Service (DAS) standards, the company is uniquely positioned to answer growing market demand for platform-independent data access to heterogeneous data within SOAs.
About DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies is the software industry’s only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world’s most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC™ and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com.