Breakthrough Enhancements Combine Unprecedented Ease-Of-Use With Proven Accuracy and Scalability Santa Clara, CA (September 2, 1998)--

Rational® Software today announced at Microsoft's Developer Days 98, PerformanceStudioTM, which is a revolutionary Web-based, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and multi-tier performance testing solution. PerformanceStudio delivers four new technological advances that lower the learning curve for tasks such as recording test data, simulating usage patterns, modeling multi-user scenarios and analyzing tests, to enable IT organizations to effectively integrate performance testing into software development and deployment processes. "The virtual user testing capabilities of PerformanceStudio make this an indispensable tool for testing our Web and Client/Server-based applications," said Eric Sidoti, quality assurance manager for the Administrative Information Systems and Services department at the University of Illinois. "In PerformanceStudio, we have a load testing tool with breakthrough ease of use, high accuracy and the scalability to dramatically expand the scope of testing our financial and administrative applications. We could never have achieved these results with other products."

PerformanceStudio integrates functional and performance testing. It includes Rational's award-winning Robot product for script recording and built in test asset management, as well as the following four innovations aimed at improving ease-of-use, accuracy and scalability: DataSmart Recording: is a breakthrough recording technology that automatically generates test scripts using variables, and binds those variables to actual test data sets. The resulting test scripts, when played back, feature unique data for each virtual user.

PerformanceStudio enables organizations to record scripts via GUI, API, or "On-the-Wire" methods. ClientSmart Pacing: is an innovation that ensures the closest possible reproduction to "live" application performance by differentiating delays among user "think times," CPU processing issues and server response times. By accurately emulating these delays in large volume tests, PerformanceStudio maintains the integrity of tests while scaling beyond thousands of virtual users. LoadSmart Scheduling: provides graphical modeling of complex, multi-user scenarios without requiring programming. This technology turns individual scripts into multi-user "schedules" that can be scaled from ten users to more than ten thousand users without changing any of the scripts or workload description.

ServerSmart Playback provides the means to correctly capture server response when playing back dynamic Web page content. Regardless of how often this content changes, ServerSmart Playback ensures that tests have correctly identified whether the Web server is returning the appropriate results as specified by the user. "Ensuring software quality is crucial for enterprise-scale applications that are critical parts of an organizations' business operations," said Michael Barnes, senior analyst for the Hurwitz Group. "To cost-effectively implement a structured approach to software testing, IT organizations should choose an integrated, easy to use solution that supports the full range of test activities, from generating test scripts all the way to analyzing test results and ensuring successful deployment."

PerformanceStudio provides an accurate prediction of an application's performance under load by enabling organizations to test the client and server components in operation together. Clients are represented by "GUI users," which are remotely controlled PCs that perform the exact tasks that a user would. At the same time, server load is driven by "virtual users," which are software processes that emulate the population of users to create realistic load on the server. In this way, PerformanceStudio enables organizations to analyze and predict what the user will see from the application under varying system loads by driving a large number of virtual and GUI inputs at the same time. For more information on the proven accuracy of PerformanceStudio, please see the PerformanceStudio white paper.

Additionally, PerformanceStudio offers users the benefit of three recording options for script creation: GUI, API and On-the-Wire. On-the-Wire recording is done at the network protocol level in a non-intrusive fashion. Because test scripts are captured and played back on the network, PerformanceStudio is platform and application independent, supporting mixed-UNIX and NT environments and every popular development tool. "Rational's mission has been to help organizations close the quality gaps in their application development process by offering and integrating the technologies needed to address reliability testing, functionality testing and performance testing," said Tom Bogan, vice president and general manager of Rational's automated testing products. "PerformanceStudio dramatically improves testing of Web and e-commerce applications. PerformanceStudio makes testing these applications intuitive and scalable to thousands of users in a Web environment." Protocols Supported PerformanceStudio provides system performance testing for web servers from Netscape, Microsoft, Apache, Sun, and others, the ERP systems of SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle, database servers of Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase; and the Tuxedo transaction monitor of BEA.

Pricing and Availability PerformanceStudio will be available within 30 days at a starting price of $10,000 (configured for Web server testing) or $30,000 (configured for database server testing). Customers with current maintenance contracts for preVue, SQA Suite: Load Test Edition and Performix will receive PerformanceStudio free of charge. PerformanceStudio is available directly from Rational and from Rational resellers. For more information, please visit Rational's Website at www.rational.com/products/performancestudio/.

About Rational Software Corporation

Rational Software (NASDAQ: RATL), creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), is the leading provider of a solution that unifies proven software development principles, tools, and services to improve the productivity of project teams and individuals. Rational's products span the critical activities of requirements management, visual modeling, testing, and configuration and change management.