New global alliance formed around Symbian to create innovative smartphones and communicators

ARM, Cadence, Digia, Dextra, Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho, Omron, Phoenix, Teleca, Vanteon, Wipro and Zi partner with Symbian in global alliance to develop new products for the WID market

SAN FRANCISCO, California - February 15th, 2000 - At the opening of Symbian's Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California, Symbian announced the Symbian Competence Center program - a world-wide partnership initiative to drive the development of innovative smartphones and communicators. The first companies to enter this partnership and become designated Symbian Competence Centers lead the wireless industry with their development and system integration skills on the Symbian platform. Working closely with Symbian's licensees,  Symbian Competence Centers  will offer a mixture of product and business development, engineering and project management skills.

Symbian has initially appointed ARM, Cadence, Digia, Dextra, Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho, Omron, Phoenix, Teleca, Vanteon, Wipro and Zi as Symbian Competence Centers. Covering the US, Asia Pacific, and Europe, these companies offer key technical, development and engineering support for companies developing Symbian based wireless information devices.

"We're creating skilled third party resources to enable rapid product creation of Symbian based communicators and smartphones. Acting as an extension of Symbian's organization, the Symbian Competence Centers are independent companies who have the skills and expertise to manage, create and develop products in close cooperation with Symbian’s licensees," said Juha Christensen, Executive Vice President, Symbian. "This new initiative demonstrates our commitment to evangelize opportunities for the wider wireless community, with the end result of growing the mass market for wireless information devices."

Symbian Competence Centers will encourage the rapid dissemination of core skills, innovative techniques and knowledge of the Symbian platform. With an increase of focus on innovation, continuously shortening product development cycles, and market targeting flexibility, this will mean earlier smartphone and communicator availability for mobile users. With these industry leaders, Symbian continues to build up a strong wireless community bringing together content, services and technology onto wireless information devices.

"The appointment of ARM as a Symbian Competence Center is further proof of the ARM^® architecture’s acceptance as a de facto standard for wireless applications," said Mike Muller, executive vice president of Business Development, ARM. "ARM and its Partnership business model will be in alignment with Symbian, with the goal of creating opportunities that will contribute to the overall growth in the mass market for wireless information devices."

"This represents an important step in our commitment to design and deliver the next generation of data enabled communications devices for our customers," said Brent Hudson, VP of Cadence Wireless and Multimedia design group. "This is an exciting market where our relationship with Symbian builds on our existing technology and capability portfolio to provide a very attractive proposition for our customers."

Mr. Daniel Chavez, Dextra Technologies Inc’s Chief Executive Officer, said "Dextra is excited to become a Symbian Competence Center. Dextra is well versed in Internet technologies and software development capabilities for Internet appliances. On the latter, our experience with device-based browser technologies, transport protocols such as WAP, the Symbian platform, and new technologies such as Bluetooth^® wireless technology will position Dextra to be part of this growing opportunity."

"We believe that Digia is quite uniquely positioned as a Symbian Competence Center to make software development for the third generation wireless information devices. Finland is a forerunner in both mobile phone and Internet penetration and many of the new concepts will be tested here first," said Mr. Pekka Sivonen, CEO, Digia, Finland. "Our expertise in digital media development, wireless software design and related professional services are the value-added that Digia wants to bring in, when creating a future-proof ecosystem around the Symbian platform."

"Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho has been working with Symbian especially in internationalization and localization, and has already had experience developing devices with Symbian licensees. We know the importance of handling the local language and optimizing the User Interface (UI) to the specific devices," said Tetsutaro Yoshimura, President of Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho Ltd., Japan. "Soon, users will be able to roam wireless networks all over the world, and they will get used to bringing their wireless information devices anywhere. That means we need a whole new concept of software design in the wide range of the software layer, i.e. server services, User Interfaces, applications and so on. Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho will work in close partnership with Symbian and its licensees by developing new software which will have high functionality but also well designed services and User Interfaces."

Hideto Matsushita, General Manager, R&D Department of Omron Software Co., Ltd. commented: "We have a lot of experience in software development of embedded and real-time systems, through the development of automation systems. We have recently given high priority to development of technology to apply Java, which is the new development paradigm, to embedded systems. Now we are in the age of the network, with networked embedded devices which have an intelligent interface by the progress of IT technology. We have optimized our competencies in competitive technologies such as natural language processing, human machine interface, and Java computing for embedded systems, like cellar phones, and we offer the best solution in providing third generation "Network Appliances" with high added value."

"Leveraging our unique experience with hardware platforms, operating systems, and power management, Phoenix is well positioned to help Symbian’s customers as a Competence Center," said Al Sisto, president and CEO of Phoenix. "Phoenix understands the importance of developing global standards for wireless Internet devices and believes that its leadership and experience, coupled with Symbian’s expertise in this market can generate significant value among wireless users and pave the road for the development of global standards."

"We believe that wireless devices are the future of computing," said Nick Wood, Director of Teleca Ltd., UK. "Naturally, we are pleased to be able to offer our customers solutions based around Symbian's class-leading technology. We have been working with Symbian since the day it was formed, so Competence Center status is a natural progression for Teleca. We look forward to working in partnership to combine our in-depth development expertise and Symbian's industry-backed platform to developing innovative new products for licensees."

"We are very excited about the Symbian Competence Center partnership. Symbian provides the platform of the future for wireless and other devices, and Vanteon is dedicated to enabling this technology. As a strategic development resource, Vanteon will work closely with Symbian and its licensees to speed up the commercialization of the next generation of WIDs, leveraging Vanteon's expertise in wireless and handheld technologies," said Jonathan Sacks, Vanteon's chairman and CEO. "Our company's expertise in providing comprehensive software, hardware, quality assurance and e-Business solutions, including all required Internet connectivity and back-end services, gives Vanteon the unique ability to provide Symbian and its OEM customers with a single partner that can provide all the features and functionality that users will want from their future wireless and handheld devices."

Dr. A. L. Rao, Chief Executive, Global R&D, the technology arm of Wipro Technologies, says "The creation of the Wipro Symbian Competence Center ensures a strengthening of our integrated service offerings for the emerging mobile computing market. By adding Symbian competency to our expertise in the areas of VLSI/System, Embedded Systems and Communication Technologies, we have enhanced our offerings for complete product development services." Mr. Ramesh Emani, Chief Executive of the Telecom Division of Wipro Technologies, adds, "At Wipro, we have demonstrated how we aid telecom equipment vendors to speed up their product development through our offshore software development services. This partnership with Symbian will help us offer end-to-end solutions for equipment vendors as well as for telecom service operators in the emerging mobile applications market."

"Zi enables Internet and information appliances with an intuitive, predictive user interface for world languages," says Antoine Blondeau, senior vice president, Marketing & Sales for Zi Corporation. "Our software engineering and integration expertise and strong presence in the Far East will benefit Symbian and its licensees."

The new  Symbian Competence Centers  are participating in Symbian’s US Developers Conference and Exhibition in Santa Clara Convention Center in California, February 15 - 17. As well as offering a mixture of Symbian-led presentations, demonstrations, workshops and training sessions, there will be opportunities to hear from the other leading voices in the wireless industry including Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Matsushita, Panasonic, Nokia, Oracle, Psion, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems, and Sybase. For more details see  Symbian Developer Network

About Symbian

Symbian owns, licenses, develops and supports leading software, user interfaces, application frameworks and development tools for wireless information devices such as communicators and smartphones. Symbian aims to promote standards for the interoperability of wireless information devices with wireless networks, content services, and messaging and enterprise wide solutions.

With headquarters in London, Symbian has offices in Tokyo and Kanazawa, Japan; Ronneby, Sweden; Cambridge, UK and San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Symbian is owned by Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia and Psion. Symbian’s web site can be found at Symbian

About the Symbian Competence Centers

ARM

ARM, a leading intellectual property (IP) provider, licenses high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC processors, peripherals, and system-chip designs to leading international electronics companies. ARM also provides comprehensive support required in developing a complete system. ARM's microprocessor cores are rapidly becoming the volume RISC standard in such markets as portable communications, hand-held computing, multi-media digital consumer and embedded solutions. ARM serves its growing partnership base from offices in Cambridge and Maidenhead, UK; Los Gatos, California; Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Northborough, MA, USA; Paris, France; Munich, Germany; Tokyo, Japan and Seoul, Korea. More information on ARM is available at  ARM

ARM, Thumb, StrongARM and ARM Powered are registered trademarks of ARM Limited. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.

Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services, and design services used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductors, computer systems, networking, and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and a variety of other electronics-based products. With approximately 5,000 employees and 1999 annual revenues of $1.1 billion, Cadence is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. and has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities located around the world. The Company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. More information about the company, its products and services may be obtained from the World Wide Web at  Cadence

Dextra

Dextra Technologies is a Sun Microsystems authorized JAVA Center as well as a Cisco Systems Professional Services Partner. Dextra is well versed and has a major focus in Internet Technologies and software development capabilities for Internet appliances. Our experience and expertise with technologies such as EPOC, positions Dextra in the front line of this critical emerging frontier. Dextra Technologies can be found online at Dextra Technologies

Digia

Digia helps its clients see the changes caused by wireless technology in the existing value-chains, defines the strategic advantages to be gained from wireless networking and offers operational solutions with tailored software. The company's strategy is based on developing Mobile Commerce software for commercialization with the leading international partners. Current Digia-team consists of 80 professionals in Finland and UK. Digia's headquarters is in Helsinki, Finland.
For more information see  Digia  

Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho, Ltd.

The company's primary areas of activity are development, marketing and/or licensing of proprietary software and related technologies, and development of software systems on contract basis. K3 also provides consultations on systems engineering, software engineering, information systems design and implementation, as well as consultations on special areas including systems programming, Japanese language processing, localization of foreign software, scientific computation, artificial intelligence applications, and microprocessor applications.

Omron

Omron not only develops embedded software of many Omron's devices/machines, but also provides middleware such as Japanese input methods or Java components. Omron has recently concentrated on improving 'Network Appliances' such as mobile phones, to meet bigger needs for wired/wireless information devices. For example, Omron already has the 'Wnn' series. The 'Wnn' series is input method environment for non-English (Japanese/Chinese/Korean) users. Omron can offer the 'Wnn' series to EPOC licensees, and also support the customers developing devices. Omron believes that they can help companies to extend their business globally.

Phoenix

Phoenix is the global leader in system-enabling software solutions for PCs and connected devices. The Company's BIOS software has been sold to more than 600 customers worldwide and is designed into more than 70 million PCs sold annually, as well as embedded systems and information appliances. Products and services of the Platform Enabling Division play a critical role in linking computing and communication technologies for OEMs, and for Internet service and content providers benefiting the information consumer. The Internet Division, PhoenixNet, provides ongoing, customized services to individuals worldwide to maximize the potential of their Personal Computer. inSilicon, a wholly owned subsidiary of Phoenix, provides communications and connectivity semiconductor intellectual property cores and protocol software. Founded in 1979, Phoenix is headquartered in San Jose, California. Information about Phoenix and its products is available at  Phoenix Technologies

Teleca Ltd.

Teleca LTD is a software house based in Manchester and Winchester developing innovative communications oriented systems for major electronics and technology companies. Customers include many of the largest names in the telecommunications industry, covering handset manufacturers, infrastructure providers and mobile operators. Formed in 1992, Teleca has grown strongly and profitably each year since, and now employs over 100 skilled software professionals. For more information please visit  Teleca Ltd

Vanteon

Vanteon is the premier national provider of comprehensive e-business and wireless solutions built upon proprietary engineering methodologies. Vanteon leverages 15 years of engineering commercial quality software and hardware products and systems into e-business and wireless solutions, which generate revenue for clients ranging from the Fortune 500 to leading .com startups. The company employs approximately 400 software, hardware and quality assurance engineers, sales and marketing professionals and support staff across seven fully integrated Development Centers in San Diego, Los Gatos and Santa Cruz, CA, Redmond, WA, Salt Lake City, UT, Boston, MA, and Rochester, NY. Corporate headquarters is located in Rochester.

Wipro

Wipro Technologies  offers a strong value proposition with their demonstrated offshore development competence and quality. Wipro Technologies, the leader in telecommunications and embedded systems software is also the world’s first software services company to be assessed at SEI CMM 5.0. Some of the Wipro’s customers include, Alcatel, Lucent Technologies, Nokia , Ericsson, Tellabs, Infineon Technologies, Cisco, Fujitsu, AGCS, Nortel, ARM.

Zi Corporation

Zi Corporation is a leading provider of embedded software technology and educational products. The company's eZiText™ input software is licensed in numerous languages for information and Internet appliances such as mobile phones, PDAs and TV set-top boxes. Zi's common shares trade on both the Toronto Stock Exchange (ZIC) and the NASDAQ stock market (ZICA). Zi markets its technology through strategic partnerships worldwide from offices in Calgary, Beijing, Hong Kong, Stockholm and San Francisco.
Zi Corporation

Symbian and the Symbian Competence Centers are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symbian Ltd. - All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Enquiries

Symbian Ltd Please direct enquiries to: +44 207 154 1383 press@symbian.com	ARM Craig Robertson craig.robertson@arm.com
Cadence Helen Hutton +44 1506 595017 helenb@cadence.com	Dextra Michael D. Montoya VP of Internet/E-commerce +1 650 330 8150 x102e mmontoya@dextratech.com
Digia Pekka Sivonen CEO +358 40 7593 601 pekka.sivonen@digia.com	Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho Naoki Kanetani Assistant Division Manager kanetani@kthree.co.jp
Omron Software Hideto Matsushita General Manager, R&D Department matusita@rd.kyoto.omronsoft.co.jp	Phoenix Toni C. Goodrich Public Relations Manager +1 408 570 1550
Teleca Nick Wood Director +44 161 447 6804	Vanteon Erin Andrews Marketing Communications Manager +1 425 250 0077 eandrews@vanteon.com
Wipro Nagendra P Bandaru +44 171 3870606 nagendra.bandaru@wipro.com	Zi Corp. Karen Attwell Manager, Investor/Media Relations +1 403 233 8875 kattwell@zicorp.com