Melbourne, FL - August 5, 2004 - Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. (The CoSORT Company) today announced the availability of its flagship data sorting and manipulation package, CoSORT™, for IBM's POWER5™ chip architecture and SUSE LINUX® Enterprise Server (SLES) 9, running on both the IBM eServer™i5 and eServer p5 systems.

Mainframe-to-UNIX® migrators, DBAs, data warehouse (ETL) architects, report writers, and application developers, can now exploit CoSORT's parallel sorting engines and data transformation capabilities on the latest generation of IBM's Power Architecture. IBM eServer i5 and eServer p5 systems are an advanced line of servers that can run Linux on POWER5 microprocessors while leveraging Micro-Partitioning™, an IBM Virtualization Engine™ technology, to achieve unprecedented computing performance and reduced costs for a wide range of business and scientific applications. Novell's SLES 9 offers the first Linux 2.6 kernel-based distribution for eServer i5 and eServer p5 servers.

CoSORT for IBM eServer is the latest in a series of IRI solutions that demonstrates the company's "ongoing commitment to IBM's Linux and server technology initiatives," according to IRI Business Development VP David Friedland. Prior to porting CoSORT V8 to POWER5, IRI ported CoSORT to IBM eServer iSeries platforms under both LINUX and OS/400 PASE. Subsequently, IRI ported CoSORT to SLES 8 and Red Hat Enterprise LINUX (RHEL) 3 on pSeries, where CoSORT traditionally runs on AIX.

In this case, IRI compiled CoSORT on an IBM eServer i5 i520 running SLES 9 at IBM's Benchmark Center in Rochester, Minnesota. The CoSORT binaries were then installed on an eServer i5 570 and eServer p5 both also running SLES 9. Both servers were similarly-configured with 4GB of memory and 2 dedicated processors. CoSORT's sort benchmark of 711MB in 22 seconds on both machines "should be indicative of the new level of price-performance CoSORT users can expect when transforming their operational data into information," Friedland observed.

In addition to record-setting sort performance, CoSORT brings seven native user interfaces and 12 third-party sort replacement facilities to the POWER5 environment. The top CoSORT interface is SortCL™ (for sort control language) -- a high-level data definition and manipulation program for reporting, migrating legacy and COBOL sort operations, and for data warehouse extracts, transforms and loads (ETL). For eCRM and "data webhouse" analysis of web logs and internet traffic in particular, SortCL features custom, multi-target/mulit-format reporting, plus direct collation and grouping of IP address data, metadata conversion for ELF files, support for manual HTML/SGML report encoding, and inner and outer joins.

About CoSORT / Innovative Routines International, Inc.
CoSORT is a leading commercial sorting and data manipulation package for UNIX and Windows platforms. CoSORT features several end-user and programmer interfaces to a central, parallel processing sort algorithm in a coroutine architecture, as well as third-party sort replacement programs. CoSORT's native front-end programs cater to data warehouse and webhouse architects requiring selection, joining, sorting, aggregation, conversion, and report generation, as well as mainframe sort users cutting over to open systems. CoSORT's award-winning Sort Control Language (SortCL) program provides a familiar and explicit DDL and DML for data transformation and reporting, and features a wide variety of third-party sort and metadata conversion utilities. More information on CoSORT/IRI, Inc. and its family of data management products is available at www.cosort.com or through 1-800-333-SORT.

More information on IBM eServer iSeries is available at www.ibm.com/servers/eserver

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Editorial Contact:
Lisa Mangino, CoSORT / IRI, Inc. 321-777-8889, ext. 224, or lisam@iri.com