Mertech Data System announced today that Tower Life Insurance of Australia will deploy ORAFlex for HP running with DataFlex 3.1c for HP Unix at its site in Sydney, Australia. Tower has purchased an unlimited site license for ORAFlex Enterprise Edition that will work with its Oracle8 Enterprise server running on HP Enterprise class machines. Tower Life relies heavily on customer and policy information stored in the Company's core life insurance administration system. This data must be accessible quickly and reliably, 24 hours a day. According to Tony Kesby, IT Manager at Tower, "the company has been using a custom developed application built in the DataFlex environment for over ten years. While this system provides excellent functionality, the underlying database technology has become outdated and does not have the scalability or robustness required by Tower Life's users today. We needed to improve the manageability of our policy administration system and, from an information technology perspective, improve reliability and recoverability. We particularly wanted to provide greater flexibility for our end users. Our most valuable corporate information was not being used as much as we would like."

Tower, along with Oracle Australia, conducted a "Proof of Technology" to evaluate ORAFlex's performance with their existing DataFlex application. This exercise started while ORAFlex was still in beta stages and was aimed at finding out whether ORAFlex was fast enough and stable enough to be deployed in Tower's production environment. "In this Proof of technology exercise, speed of response was excellent, as was the stability of the product. When support questions arose, Mertech provided excellent turnaround time on our queries. A move to a more mainstream database, while not losing the investment we have built over 10 years in our DataFlex application code, would not have been possible without the Mertech driver." Tower went into production with the new environment in January 1999.

About Tower Life Insurance

Tower Life provides insurance services to more than 120,000 policyholders for life and superannuating products such as death and trauma cover, business and income protection, personal and corporate superannuating. Tower Life is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with assets of over $700 million.