SolarMetric Acquires New Technology - Company Now Leader in JDO Arena.

SolarMetric, a company spearheaded by MIT alumni, announced today that it purchased Kodo JDO, an implementation of Sun's Java Data Objects (JDO) specification. Kodo JDO provides access to relational databases through the JDO specification, enabling Java developers to use existing relational database technology from Java without needing to know SQL or be an expert in relational database design.

WASHINGTON, DC, USA - SolarMetric, a company spearheaded by MIT alumni, announced today that it purchased Kodo JDO, an implementation of Sun's Java Data Objects (JDO) specification.

"The combination of SolarMetric's JDO expertise and product support combined with the Kodo JDO assets immediately position SolarMetric as the technical leader in the Java Data Objects space," said Patrick Linskey, Vice President of Engineering at SolarMetric Inc.

Under the terms of the asset purchase, SolarMetric will also acquire a robust customer base in addition to Kodo trademarks.

Kodo was initially developed by TechTrader, Inc. The original developers left TechTrader to focus their energy on SolarMetric, and are now involved in the day-to-day operations and development at SolarMetric.

Kodo JDO Standard Edition will be generally available on February 11, 2001. Kodo JDO Enterprise Edition will be generally available on February 25, 2001.

"Our team is free to focus on writing the business logic specific to our application," writes Eric Lindauer, a software developer at Highbridge Capital Management, which manages a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. "Kodo truly has removed the burdens of persistence and remoteness from the radar of most of our team. The strongest evidence of the success of this abstraction is this: although all members of the team have written persistent, distributed objects, only one member of the team needed an in-depth knowledge of JDO."

"We are excited about the worldwide opportunities that Kodo JDO offers us," said Neelan Choksi, President of SolarMetric. "We will build on the successes of Kodo JDO as we surround it with additional tools that meet our corporate vision of making life easier for enterprise Java developers.

"Equally important are the customer relationships that the talented Kodo team has established over the past year in the JDO space," Choksi continued.

About SolarMetric, Inc.
SolarMetric is a global company with corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C., USA. A strong team of Java developers and experienced business leaders founded Solarmetric in 2001. The core technology team has been together since 1997, working on enterprise web applications and networking products. SolarMetric was formed to address some of the inefficiencies identified by the core technology team while dealing with existing products.

SolarMetric creates enterprise development products leveraging Sun's Java development language. SolarMetric's products are targeted towards enabling application developers to focus on their application logic rather than on deployment-specific details.

SolarMetric's client base represents all major industries and includes customers in the European Union, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United States.

About Kodo JDO
Kodo JDO is SolarMetric's implementation of Sun's Java Data Objects specification. Kodo JDO provides access to relational databases through the JDO specification, enabling Java developers to use existing relational database technology from Java without needing to know SQL or be an expert in relational database design. It can be used with existing database schemas, or can automatically generate its own schema.

Kodo JDO has been tested against IBM DB2 UDB 7.2, InstantDB 3.26, Microsoft SQLServer 8.00, MySQL 3.23.43, Oracle 8.1.7, and PostgreSQL 6.5. Support for other databases not on this list can easily be added to Kodo JDO, either by a third party, or by SolarMetric's consulting team.

Kodo JDO Standard Edition is a complete solution for developers who need a fully-functional JDO solution but aren't interested in using JDO in concert with a J2EE application server.

Kodo JDO Enterprise Edition is a fully spec-compliant JDO implementation. It is the ideal choice for applications that will be run in a J2EE application server, such as BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, or JBoss. It permits integrating JDO operations into globally-managed transactions, letting all JDO transactional operations be governed by the application server.

Additionally, SolarMetric is working on several add-on products, including advanced caching options that will be useful for many server-based applications.

About Sun's Java Data Objects Specification
The Java Data Objects (JDO) specification is a new specification sponsored by Sun Microsystems. It defines a standard set of interfaces for storing Java objects in data stores such as relational databases.

This standard greatly simplifies the development of enterprise applications, as application developers no longer need to learn datastore-specific interfaces and languages in order to store long-term objects in a database. This allows the developers to focus on the logic behind their application rather than on the details of communicating with a database.