OSGi Alliance Names IBM as a Sponsor of Its 2004 World Congress; Platinum-Level Support Announced for October Event in Barcelona, Spain

SAN RAMON, Calif.--June 30, 2004--The OSGi(TM) Alliance today announced IBM as a Platinum Sponsor of the OSGi Alliance 2004 World Congress. IBM has been actively involved with the OSGi Alliance from its inception in 1999 at both the Board of Directors and technical expert group levels and has provided strategically significant contributions to the OSGi Service Platform.

The OSGi Alliance 2004 World Congress will draw the world's top experts on commercially available and developing OSGi implementations, offering focused tracks for the mobile, automotive and home markets as promised by its theme, "Convergence: Going Mobile, Driving, and Staying Home with OSGi Solutions." The Congress will be held at the Hilton Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain on October 11-15, 2004, and on-line registration is currently open at www.osgiworldcongress.com.

"As devices grow in computing power, handheld computers, PDAs, consumer appliances, and even automobiles start performing functions that used to be limited to PCs and laptops. This means that standards and interoperability are more crucial than ever," said Craig Hayman, Vice President Development, IBM Pervasive Computing Division. "IBM has been involved with the OSGi Alliance from the start, driving the various releases of the specification and working with the industry to advance the OSGi Alliance and its mission."

This is the third year of Platinum Sponsorship for IBM, and highlights the strategic significance that IBM places on the OSGi Alliance to drive convergence of applications and services in the mobile, automotive and digital home markets. The annual World Congress is an open-to-the-public conference featuring pre- and post-event workshops, exhibitions, keynote presentations and breakout seminars targeted at experts and novices alike. Agenda sessions will illustrate the benefits of the OSGi Service Platform for end-users, network operators, and manufacturers and focus on how to easily deploy, provision, maintain, and manage applications and services to wired and wireless networked devices.

"We're very pleased to have such a prominent company as IBM as a major sponsor," said Dr. John Barr, President of the OSGi Alliance. "The acceptance of the OSGi Service Platform has exploded over the last year, with framework developers, device manufacturers, and service providers releasing OSGi enabled products and services in many markets."

Building on last year's highly successful Congress in Dusseldorf, Germany, the OSGi Alliance recently formed a Mobile Expert Group (MEG), to define the requirements and specifications to tailor and extend the OSGi Service Platform for mobile devices. The 2004 World Congress will provide an inside look at the work being performed within the OSGi Alliance by its members to create device middleware solutions for the mobile industry.

The event is being produced for the OSGi Alliance by Global Inventures.

For registration information go to www.osgiworldcongress.com.

About IBM

IBM (www.ibm.com) is the world's leading on demand business company offering a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that help businesses take advantage of emerging innovation. IBM provides a robust infrastructure for your on demand environment based on open industry standards like those of the OSGi Alliance. Integration mandates open standards. With billions of smart devices interacting, the problems of integration cannot be solved with an exclusively proprietary approach. The OSGi Service Platform is a vital link in the value chain of open industry standards that make possible new worlds of on demand business solutions based on intelligent, networked devices in businesses, industry, vehicles, the home, and even mobile environments like mobile phones. With the IBM Service Management Framework(TM), the OSGi Framework component of IBM Workplace Client Technology, Micro Edition; WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) environment; Eclipse and WebSphere Studio Device Developer development tools; DB2(R) Everyplace, and Cloudscape(TM) databases; MQSeries(R) Everyplace message queuing systems; combined with WebSphere and Lotus(R) server software; and consulting services from the world's largest IT services organization -- IBM Global Services -- IBM provides a complete range of OSGi based business solutions.

About the OSGi Alliance

The OSGi Alliance is an open forum. Its mission is to specify, create, advance, and promote an open service platform for the delivery and management of multiple applications and services to all types of networked devices in home, vehicle, mobile, and other environments. The OSGi Alliance serves as the focal point for a collaborative ecosystem of service provider, technology, industrial, consumer and automotive electronics communities. As an independent non-profit corporation, the OSGi Alliance also provides for the fair and uniform creation and distribution of relevant intellectual property -- including specifications, reference implementations, and test suites -- to all its members.

The OSGi Service Platform is an extensible integration platform used to remotely and dynamically deploy, provision, maintain, and manage applications and services to devices in networked environments, such as homes, vehicles, mobile handhelds, and industrial settings.

Membership is open to any interested party, including Internet service providers, network operators, original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, end users, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. The consortium's Web site address is http://www.osgi.org.

About Global Inventures, Inc. (event producer)

Global Inventures creates and operates collaborative communities in the technology market. Our experts work with community founders and members to incubate, structure, and operate these collaborative communities so that they can successfully create ecosystems, drive technology innovation, and educate buyers. Since its inception Global Inventures has launched 20 collaborative communities, managed the creation of more than 20 collaborative industry specifications, created and managed seven compliance/certification programs, and helped develop markets with more than $10 billion in addressable value. The firm uniquely blends people, processes, and technology to help collaborative communities move from blueprints to market acceptance.

Global Inventures successfully produced the 2003 OSGi Alliance World Congress, and its event production staff provides end-to-end event planning and implementation for conferences, expos, member meetings and outreach seminars.

Global Inventures -- Accelerating Results Through Collaboration (www.inventures.com).

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