SolarMetric Taps McKern to Lead Sales Efforts in the Americas & Asia

Released_By: SolarMetric Inc.

For_Immediate_Release

November 4, 2002 Washington, D.C. -- SolarMetric, a company spearheaded by MIT alumni, announced today that Richard McKern will lead the company's sales efforts for the Americas and Asia. Richard McKern, another MIT alumnus, brings three years of corporate technology sales experience to the growing SolarMetric team. McKern has worked in the technology field for over ten years.

"I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with SolarMetric's team of talented technologists," said Richard McKern, SolarMetric's Director of Sales. "SolarMetric's flagship product, Kodo™ JDO, reduces the time spent writing redundant code on Java projects. It is an exciting and innovative product that Java developers are increasingly finding essential. Managers love the product as well since the increased efficiencies mean it pays for itself in a month."

McKern's addition could not have come at a better time. The Java Data Objects (JDO) specification has been standardized and is now available publicly. SolarMetric's implementation, Kodo JDO, is rapidly gaining acclaim among technology managers worldwide as a robust and high performing implementation of the JDO standard. McKern will be an integral part of ensuring corporations can leverage the tremendous value that Kodo JDO brings.

"As larger corporations have become increasingly interested in purchasing Kodo JDO, it was critical to have an experienced enterprise director of sales who truly understands the technology. Richard was our top choice with his background of successful technology sales engagements. It speaks volumes about SolarMetric's momentum that we were able to attract such a talented individual," said Neelan Choksi, President of SolarMetric.

Before coming to SolarMetric, McKern was a top sales director at OPNET Technologies. McKern worked at OPNET for 3 years. Last year he brought in over $2.6 million and was inducted to the Chairman's Club for outstanding contributions to the company. Previous to that, McKern was an Account Manager at the PMC Group. He also has done independent technology consulting. McKern graduated from MIT in 1994 with degrees in Engineering and Writing.

McKern will be based out of SolarMetric's Washington, D.C. office. SolarMetric also recently opened a sales office in Paris to work with clients in Europe and the Middle East.

About SolarMetric, Inc. SolarMetric is a global company founded by MIT alumni with corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C. and offices in Austin, Houston, Boston and France. The company creates enterprise development products leveraging Sun's Java development language. SolarMetric's products are targeted towards enabling application developers to focus on their application logic rather than on deployment-specific details.

To learn more about SolarMetric, visit http://www.solarmetric.com.

About Kodo JDO Kodo JDO is SolarMetric's implementation of Sun's Java Data Objects specification. Kodo JDO provides access to relational databases through the JDO specification, enabling Java developers to use existing relational database technology from Java without needing to know SQL or be an expert in relational database design. It can be used with existing database schemas, or can automatically generate its own schema.

Kodo JDO has passed SolarMetric's internal certification process for IBM DB2 UDB, InstantDB, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Oracle, PointBase, Sybase ASE, Hypersonic, and PostgreSQL. Support for other databases are constantly being added by SolarMetric, but can also be implemented by the end-user by utilizing Kodo's extensive pluggable API.

Kodo JDO Standard Edition is a complete solution for developers who need a fully-functional JDO solution but aren't interested in using JDO in concert with a J2EE application server.

Kodo JDO Enterprise Edition is a high-performance implementation of the JDO specification. It is the ideal choice for applications that will be run in a J2EE application server, such as BEA's WebLogic 6.1, IBM's WebSphere 4, or JBoss 3.0. It permits integrating JDO operations into globally-managed transactions, letting all JDO transactional operations be governed by the application server. Kodo JDO Enterprise Edition comes bundled with tools for extending the JDO Query Langauge and single-JVM and distributed caching. Depending on the application, Kodo JDO with caching has shown 20-40x performance improvements over standalone JDO.

About Sun's Java Data Objects Standard The Java Data Objects (JDO) specification is a specification developed under the Java Community Process sponsored by Sun Microsystems. It defines a standard set of interfaces for storing Java objects in data stores such as relational databases.

This standard greatly simplifies the development of enterprise applications, as application developers no longer need to learn datastore-specific interfaces and languages in order to store long-term objects in a database. This allows the developers to focus on the logic behind their application rather than on the details of communicating with a database.

SolarMetric supports the standard by presenting at local Java User Groups throughout the world, participating on the JDO specification expert team, and committing to JDOcentral.com as an original charter member.