Developer Survey Shows Performance Requirements Usher in the Multi-Core Era

BOULDER, CO--(Marketwire - November 3, 2008) - Rogue Wave Software, Inc., the leader in enterprise class C++ components and infrastructure, today announced results of a global survey of nearly 700 software developers and IT architects to gauge their organizations' attitudes towards and understand their plans to begin migrating legacy applications to multi-core hardware. As the enterprise IT sector hits performance thresholds with single-core servers, devising a resource-efficient strategy is paramount. The survey was designed to better understand the challenges they are facing in this process and the strategies they are employing to address those issues.

According to the research:

The shift to multi-core is imminent:

--  52% said that addressing the multi-core issue is either a top priority
    or an important issue within their organization.
--  63% are either considering moving in the next 12 months or have moved
    at least a portion of their existing C++ apps to multi-core hardware; 43%
    said that a number of those were mission critical apps.
--  More than half (55%) said that they have a large portion, most or all
    of their production servers on multi-core.
    

Performance requirements are the primary driver for the flight to multi-core servers:

--  58% said that an increase in performance has been the reason behind
    their organizations shifting existing applications to multi-core hardware.
--  92% said that their business applications have high performance
    requirements; of those that have high performance apps, 69% said that their
    business applications have requirements to support high throughput.
--  82% said that performance requirements for their organizations' apps
    are on the rise.
--  Of those that said performance requirements are increasing, nearly 40%
    said that increase in data volumes are growing.
    

Several of the respondents noted that achieving high performance cost efficiently was a critical success factor:

--  "Our applications are typically heavily multi-threaded. Multi-core
    servers offer more parallelism without the high cost of higher end hardware
    (with many CPUs).
--  For one particular organization "Applying complex mathematical model
    calculations to large portfolios is a known performance hog for capital
    markets."
--  "Better utilization of multi-core servers provides direct benefits in
    the operation costs of our services."
--  "It looks like at some point we won't be able to purchase (single)-
    core chips. So, (1) if we have the processing horsepower, we should be
    leveraging it, and (2) there is risk that as there are more cores per chip
    that the per core clock rate will decrease and (single)-core apps will
    actually run slower, which we cannot tolerate."
    

There are varying strategies in addressing the multi-core dilemma:

--  55% said that they would either rely on in-house development teams for
    re-configuration, or re-write/re-architect existing applications to run in
    parallel or a combination of both.
--  60% said they would rely on vendors for either tools or platforms to
    address the multi-core issue or a combination of both.
--  60% said they would rely on tools to address multi-threading,
    parallelism and thread execution improvements.
    

"Multi-core and many-core hardware is offering huge increases in processing power that can greatly reduce costs while increasing application throughput," said Patrick Leonard, Vice President, Engineering and Product Strategy at Rogue Wave Software. "Many existing enterprise apps are not able to take full advantage of the benefits multi-core hardware provides, which creates the 'multi-core dilemma.' Fortunately, tools are available to make this much easier than it has been in the past. Rather than rewriting applications to be multi-threaded, tools such as Rogue Wave® Hydra can use service parallelism to reduce the initial effort of moving to multi-core and make ongoing changes to the parallel model configurable, rather than hard-coded."

About Rogue Wave® Hydra

The Rogue Wave® Hydra Suite is a suite of products for developing and deploying high performance business applications. The Hydra Suite consists of HydraEnterprise, HydraExpress, and HydraSDO™ working together to deliver the agility and flexibility benefits a service oriented architecture (SOA) inherently provides, without sacrificing the high performance businesses require. The Rogue Wave Hydra Suite products can work standalone or integrated together in an efficient service framework.

About Rogue Wave Software

Rogue Wave Software, Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise class C++ components and infrastructure that enable organizations to build and deploy high performance applications. Only Rogue Wave provides the most complete C++ technology stack including C++ components, UI components, run-time infrastructure, and services. Today, thousands of organizations worldwide have chosen Rogue Wave. For more information go to http://www.roguewave.com.

Rogue Wave is a registered trademark and HydraSDO is a trademark of Rogue Wave Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

Contact Information: Media Relations Contact: Suzanne Miller Reidy Communications (415) 573-0710