Menlo Park, Calif. - March 21, 1995 - Siemens Medical Systems, Inc., a division of Siemens AG, has selected the VERSANT ODBMS (object database management system) from Versant Object Technology Corporation (Versant), for the development of a worldwide Common System Architecture (CSA) framework to support all medical imaging projects.

This worldwide contract includes several thousand VERSANT ODBMS licenses over the next five years and is valued at 3 million Deutsche Marks. Siemens' Medical Technology Division in Erlangen, Germany is developing the CSA, which will support all medical imaging applications for Siemens instruments including computer tomography, magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and x-ray equipment. The VERSANT ODBMS will be the central data repository for CSA.

Siemens plans to deliver about 3,000 of these instruments each year. The installations will range from small medical practices with only one instrument to a complete hospital information technology infrastructure with several hundred stations in a network. VERSANT was chosen because of its optimum administration and its ability to handle high complex patient data in a distributed environment.

Siemens selected Versant over other databases, including Oracle, because of the following:

• The ODMG (object data management group) which established interface standards for object databases, has standardized the VERSANT C++ interface. Most other vendors have to make major modifications in their interfaces. In particular, the ODMG decided that the persistence ability will be provided by inheriting from a base class.
• VERSANT includes an object-server which knows the structure and location of stored objects. Queries will be handled in the server and only matched objects will be transferred to the client via the network.
• Versant is the only vendor able to support compiler-independent heterogeneous clients, allowing Siemens to connect Sun, HP, IBM, and DEC workstations, with different C++ compilers.

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