These customer wins showcase a cultural shift by top financial firms toward selecting and standardizing on a single vendor that provide proven solutions, enterprise deployment support expertise and agile technology to meet the more aggressive usage demands and wider-scale adoption of data fabric technology in capital markets. As banks begin migrating from more modest, single-project oriented deployments toward wide-scale adoption, they are choosing to deploy solutions and services to support their enterprise requirements across business units. This shift in deployment practices recognizes the maturing of the technology and its proven ability to support a wide range of applications across front, middle and back office operations. In many of the banks, this decision and selection process has been supported by a rigorous competitive evaluation process and extensive proof of concept (POC) testing of various infrastructure technology vendors.

"Over the last six to nine months, we have seen a marked increase in activity from Wall Street in demanding these POC's to validate their assertion that a single-vendor provider option is right for them," stated Raj Kulkarni, chief operating officer and founder of GemStone Systems. "We are delighted with the performance of our product and our financial services sales and support teams in these projects. Financial services are a key focus area for the company and our investments there are clearly visible in our customer wins and the expertise of our people. We are confident that as we continue to engage with other top tier banks in 2008, we will demonstrate that we have the best solution for enterprise wide use."

Top tier banks are paying close attention to vendors that not only can offer flexible contracts, standards-based APIs, cutting-edge product roadmaps and dedicated implementation teams with expertise in enterprise-wide data management infrastructure but also have proven solutions with long track records of sucords of success. Vendors without this flexibility and expertise are becoming less relevant to Wall Street.

"Enterprise deployment in tier one banks marks a coming of age for data fabrics," says Bob Giffords, independent banking and technology analyst. "Not only are they endorsing the enormous scalability and industrial strength of the GemFire solution, but they are also testifying to the real value-added of combining the semantics of data management, messaging, caching and continuous query. Distributed data fabrics are now replacing database storage as the key component for the real time, event-driven enterprise. Everyone should be reassessing their technology strategies."

GemStone sees this shift in deployment practices as a growing trend beyond the financial services community as well. It is already seeing significant wins with providers of both enterprise applications and infrastructure platforms to industries outside financial services.

"The banks are evolving their usage model and desire to exploit the value of this technology well beyond a handful of projects. Having quantified the financial upside and the enhanced risk reduction, they are aggressively moving within the context of larger agreements to remove the constraints of project level justification to leverage the overall operational value of this technology across their enterprises. As an enterprise software company, Gemstone has the history, the focus, the referential success and the credibility to be able to step up to this challenge," says Richard Lamb, president and founder of GemStone Systems. "With the momentum from these deals and the opportunity to close several more in 2008, we intend to lead the enterprise-wide adoption of distributed data management solutions for the financial services community now and in the future."