February 2, 2004

In planning our new NS 5 product line, ABS NS chose to reevaluate all technical aspects of its product construction, including choice of underlying database technology.

We decided early on to take a standards-based approach in order to take advantage of the tools and support available in the marketplace for industry-standard technologies. We recognized also that such an approach would enable us to avoid being "locked in" to any particular vendor's solution and allow us to be responsive to the evolving needs and preferences of our clients over time.

From discussions with our clients and from our own experience, we knew that the key criteria for any database management system (DBMS) for NS 5 would include reliability, minimal administration requirements, low cost of ownership, and good performance. In particular, the ability to sustain long periods of uninterrupted, hands-off operation remains a critical requirement for a vessel-based system.

After considering numerous products available on the market, we settled on the MySQL database manager as the primary database platform for NS 5. The MySQL DBMS has been around for many years, having originated in the open-source software movement which produced Linux and numerous other increasingly popular software offerings, but is now distributed, updated and supported by a commercial software company, MySQL of Sweden.

With numerous significant enhancements having been made to the software in the last couple of years, MySQL is now enjoying a tremendous surge in popularity and acceptance.