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Rogue Wave Press Release

Survey of Enterprise Developers Shows Multi-core Hardware Adoption Widespread but Under Exploited

Study Explores Scalability, Flexibility and Performance Challenges

BOULDER, Colo., June 26, 2007 — Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (QVDX) and a supplier of software development solutions for high performance business applications, today announced survey findings that indicate that while most organizations adopt multi-core hardware with the primary goal of increasing application performance, few are currently taking full advantage of the technology's benefits. The study, commissioned to explore the impact of deploying enterprise applications on multi-core hardware, looks closely at scalability, performance and functionality issues.

Many industry experts believe that, with the advent of multi-core technology, single-core servers are soon to be a thing of the past. While some applications can make the move to multi-core without issue, many others - especially mission-critical applications that require ordered processing - may encounter problems unless rewritten to handle multi-core hardware. Rewriting applications is often a time consuming, risky and extremely costly process.

Despite this, a summary of the findings by King Research notes that many business applications are still written as single-threaded programs that do not fully utilize multi-core technology. The report, entitled "Multi-core Hardware and Application Performance," is based on a survey of software development professionals conducted in May 2007. The research, in its entirety, can be found online here. Notable results show:

  • Multi-core Servers are Purchased Primarily to Increase Performance
    An overwhelming 91 percent of respondents said that the primary reason for purchasing multi-core hardware was to increase application performance. Only 7 percent reported adopting multi-core hardware to decrease costs.
  • Enterprise Applications Do Not Scale in Proportion to the Number of Cores
    More than 65 percent of participants said that they run enterprise applications on both single-core and multi-core hardware. Of this group, only 10 percent reported that their enterprise applications scaled linearly in proportion to the number of cores. An additional 10 percent said that their applications did not run faster and 2 percent said their applications ran slower on multi-core hardware.
  • Scalability and Functionality Issues are Reported with Multi-core Hardware
    More than 30 percent of participants who ran enterprise applications on multi-core hardware reported issues with scalability and functionality. Specific issues referred to include unusual bugs, network connection and gating problems, race conditions, threading within applications, synchronization and redesigning applications to use parallel execution.
  • Organizations are Not Embracing Approaches to Prevent Scaling Issues
    Only 30 percent of participants said that steps - like rewriting applications to be multi-threaded or using tools to enable concurrent development - were being taken by their organizations to ensure that issues with multi-core hardware did not occur.
  • Lack of Tools is the Most Challenging Aspect of Concurrent Programming
    Participants were asked an open-ended question about the challenges of writing applications to run concurrently in order to take advantage of multi-core hardware. The most frequently cited answer was the lack of tools available for concurrent application development.

"The survey findings prove that many companies have yet to discover how to make the most of multi-core technology investments," said Patrick Leonard, vice president of product development at Rogue Wave Software. "When utilized properly, multi-core hardware can save companies a lot of money and can significantly improve application performance - but developers have to be aware of, and prepared for, the deployment challenges well in advance."

About King Research

King Research provides marketing research and consulting services in the high-tech and enterprise computing markets using proven research methodology combined with in-depth technical expertise. Our projects result in our clients gaining a clear understanding of opportunities, priorities, perceptions, motivations and requirements in markets in which they wish to build their business. For more information see http://www.kingres.com.

Rogue Wave Software

Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (Nasdaq: QVDX), provides reusable software components and services to professional developers for enterprise-class, high-performance application development. Today, thousands of developers at some of the world's leading companies have used Rogue Wave® products to develop mission-critical applications. Rogue Wave Software operates throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit www.roguewave.com.

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Rogue Wave and SourcePro are registered trademarks of Rogue Wave Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

Contact:

Andrea Lashnits
Phone: 720-554-1246
E-mail: andrea.lashnits@quovadx.com