Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

QL2, IBM Partner in Large-Scale Move to Standardize Data Management

IBM's new open source standard offers collaboration
across platforms and applications

August 9, 2005 – Seattle – QL2 Software, an award-winning vendor of data extraction software for web-enabled resources, today announces their partnership in IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). QL2, along with a consortium of 14 other software manufacturers, has announced its support for IBM's open source standards.

UIMA offers a blueprint for processing unstructured data, allowing software vendors to cooperate rather than compete in the analysis of text, video, and audio sources. QL2's role within the UIMA standard is to offer data extraction from web-enabled documents into a usable form and provide it in a format that other partners are able to analyze.

"UIMA provides, for the first time, true interoperability among different knowledge discovery, search, business intelligence and text analytics software," said Arthur Ciccolo, Department Group Manger for Information and Knowledge Management, IBM Research.

QL2 Software is the developer of WebQL, knowledge discovery software that excels at navigating and extracting data from web-enabled applications. WebQL uses a concise, SQL-like syntax to query unstructured data sources. Its massively parallel processing, integrated identity protection, and deployment in Windows, Unix, and Linux environments has made it a business intelligence solution favored by Fortune 500 companies.

"We're very excited about the lead IBM has taken in creating a viable, open source standard for processing unstructured data," said Chris Buckingham, CEO of QL2 Software. "The cost of duplicated effort in text analytics has been huge. Consumers will gain a substantial value from the integration of these different vendors' software."

UIMA was the cooperative effort of IBM researchers, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Defense, and several leading U.S. universities. DARPA was also instrumental in creating the Internet.

About QL2 Software, Inc.
QL2 is an award winning vendor of intelligent agent software that extracts and transforms targeted data from unstructured sources such as the web, PDF files, email archives, Word and Excel documents, providing data for competitive intelligence, business intelligence, and text analysis applications. QL2 provides the data that drives the enterprise. For more information, visit www.ql2.com.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM's UIMA initiative, visit www.ibm.com.

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