Akiva Announces the Initial Release of Open Source Platform

Carlsbad – November 11, 2003 – Akiva Corporation, a leading developer of collaboration technology, today announced the initial release of the Madrid Platform. Designed as a standards-based alternative to proprietary architectures for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) applications, the Madrid Platform represents the first open development environment for the new breed of collaboration-enabled applications that are being brought to market.

The Madrid Platform plugs into Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and provides key APIs and services to enable the development of rich and robust collaborative content management applications. As a whole, the Madrid Platform builds upon the strengths of the J2EE environment while significantly improving developer productivity, application maintainability and application richness.

“Akiva’s Madrid Platform fills a much needed gap,” said Jonathan B. Spira, CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex, a leading research and consulting firm that pioneered collaborative business knowledge research. “By enabling companies to leverage the benefits of Open Source software in the increasingly important areas of content management and collaboration, companies can now deploy comprehensive, flexible, and reliable collaborative business environments based on an Open Source platform,” he continued.

The Madrid Platform provides native XML document management, user management, collaboration (asynchronous and synchronous) and workflow models. Developers can create applications using a rich collection of Java classes, which form an application framework that manages collaborative complexities such as security, presence, versioning, presentation and user extensible schemas. The Madrid Platform provides transparent access to underlying data storage (using any popular SQL database) and integration with a wide variety of collaboration channels through integration gateways (email, chat, instant messaging, bulletin board, news feeds, etc.).

“When viewed in the context of current industry acquisitions (such as Documentum and eRooms) it is clear that there is value in aligning content and collaboration in order to enable a new class of enterprise applications,” said Eric Olinger, CEO of Akiva Corporation. “Akiva, like other application developers, has been looking for an open architecture that leverages the power of modern standards in content and collaboration to provide gateways to existing proprietary systems. We couldn’t find one so we decided to build it ourselves.”

Madrid’s goal is to create an environment in which the developer can concentrate on expressing the business logic of an application, without having to re-invent the wheel to deliver a secure, multi-user content management system. The goal on the back end of the platform is to provide a wide variety of interface and integration options via J2EE interfaces, Web Services (to include .NET), and standard network protocols.

The Madrid Platform is available under the LGPL open source license, making it freely available for use with open source applications as well as being a foundation for commercial applications (Akiva has committed to delivering all future versions of its enterprise applications on this open platform). Additionally, the platform is currently being enhanced and extended by an open source development community to provide additional features and integration with other open and proprietary systems. Akiva developers are leading this effort, having contributed over $4M (USD) in development resources to this project.

The Madrid Platform is part of the Madrid Project for enterprise-class open collaborative applications. Additional open applications and services built on the platform will be supported through this project. The platform and additional information on the Madrid Project are available via the project web site at: www.madrid-project.org. More information on Akiva can be found at www.akiva.com.

Akiva, Madrid Project and Madrid Platform are trademarks of Akiva. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact:
Julie Bassett
Bassett PR & Marketing
(949) 481-8801
julieb@bassettpr.com