VERSANT HELPS AIRLINE DELIVER CUSTOMER BENEFITS; BRITISH AIRWAYS SELECTS VERSANT FOR 21ST CENTURY CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Versant Corporation, a leading provider of high performance enterprise database management systems, has announced that British Airways one of the world's leading airlines, has selected the Versant Object Database Management System (ODBMS) for its next generation Origin and Destination (O&D) Revenue Management System.

O&D Revenue Management is an essential business requirement for major airlines seeking to maximize revenues from their worldwide route networks and alliances. This system will enable British Airways to offer individual customers even greater value and service availability when they require connecting flights to complete their global travel plans. This new core business system, which will be among the first of its kind, will be delivered in phases beginning in mid-1999.

"This program represents a multi-million dollar opportunity for Versant, and comes after several months of parallel analysis and testing of Versant against competing relational and other object technologies," said Nick Ordon, Versant's President and CEO. "This strategic partnership demonstrates Versant to be the ideal platform for this new airline system. We are priviledged to work with British Airways, one of the world's leading carriers, who has consistently demonstrated for many years to be at the forefront of customer service."

Paul Summerbell, Strategy and Architecture Manager of the Revenue Management Systems division of British Airways said, "Delivering the customer service benefits of a full Origin and Destination Management System cannot be done with anything other than a purely object-based system. Versant provides consistently robust, high performance across the wide complexity of data types involved, making it ideal for a strategic application that will help us be ever more customer driven and focused well into the next century."

Growth in air travel is requiring more and more travellers to transfer between connecting flights in order to reach their destinations. For example, terminals at Heathrow are seeing up to 50% of passengers transferring and connecting to other flights. Airlines, therefore, need to understand the full details of a passenger's itinerary in order to offer the most effective combination of interconnecting flights between the various partner airlines. Existing revenue management systems are not designed to utilize all of the passenger's itinerary information, and need to be upgraded. This system capability will enable British Airways to maintain its position as a leader in airline revenue management and help retain its reputation as the world's favorite airline.

In evolving their systems to utilize full O&D and customer information, British Airways recognized that the variety and volume of journey combinations and passenger characteristics to be modelled expands exponentially in complexity. Traditional relational database technology cannot deliver the required performance, and an end-to-end object-oriented system is essential to providing the high performance and scalability required by one of the IT industry's most sophisticated commercial applications.

The project team chose the Versant ODBMS because it met the requirement for a robust, highly resilient object database that enabled complex, dynamic data and data relationships to be easily modelled and managed, while providing rapid and distributed access to end users. The ability for changes to be made quickly and without disruption was another key factor. The Versant ODBMS was selected after British Airways evaluated leading systems from other relational and object vendors. In addition, Versant has proven experience and expertise in building O&D Revenue Management Systems for airlines, including Air France.

The new O&D Revenue Management System builds on the success of British Airways' current solution which went live in 1991. The new system will use Versant ODBMS Version 5, running on a Sun Unix platform, and is being developed using development tools from Rational Software. Developed in London, the system will be delivered in phases from mid-1999 and will eventually support 250 market analysts at British Airways' London based head office.

About Versant Corporation

Versant Corporation is a leading provider of high-performance, enterprise database management systems in complex data and distributed computing environments. Versant solutions are used across a broad range of industries including telecommunications, financial services, health care, energy and the emerging market for intranet and transactional Internet applications. The Versant ODBMS and its related products offer distributed enterprises large-scale reliability, scalability and performance for mission-critical applications within existing computing environments.

Versant customers include ADC Telecommunications, AT&T, Alcatel Network Systems, Banque Nationale de Paris, British Telecommunications plc., CalFP, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, DSET, EDS, Equitable Insurance, Fleet Bank, GTE Data Systems, Hitachi Telecom, HNC Software, Lucent, National Westminster Bank, NationsBank, Northern Telecom, PSI Net, Sabre Decision Technologies, Samsung, Siemens, Sprint, Schweizerische Mobiliar Versicherung, Texaco, TRW, and MCI WorldCom. Versant is headquartered in Fremont, California. Additional information about Versant and its products may be obtained by phone at 510-789-1500 or via the World Wide Web at http://www.versant.com.