NEWS RELEASE TRANSMITTED BY CANADIAN CORPORATE NEWS
FOR: STERNE STACKHOUSE INC.
ASE SYMBOL: SSX
JANUARY 13, 1999
Sterne Stackhouse Inc. Teams Up With International Petrodata Limited and Petroleum Information/Dwights Canada Ltd.
CALGARY, ALBERTA--Sterne Stackhouse Inc. ("SSI") announces that its sales partner in Canadian oil & gas initiatives, Petroleum Information/Dwights Canada Ltd., ("PIDC") has signed a comprehensive Letter of Intent to purchase International Petrodata Limited ("IPL"). The goal is to close the sale by early February, 1999, and thereby incorporate IPL's well file with PIDC's land file. The IPL well file is the most sought after well data source in Calgary's oil and gas industry. IHS Energy Group of Denver, Colorado owns PIDC, and is in the business of acquiring and marketing, on a global basis, the best oil and gas data repositories available for sale and distribution.
On December 29th, 1998, SSI signed an exclusive agreement to combine SSI's Petro-LAB(TM) with all of PIDC's public oil and gas databases. "Best of breed" has been a key factor behind assembling a team of offerings that will continue to grow. IPL's well file, PIDC's land file, and SSI's Petro-LAB(TM) are all industry leaders. PIDC paid SSI $1,000,000 for the exclusive.
PIDC's choice of Petro-LAB(TM) goes well beyond being the best query and retrieval software available. Petro-LAB(TM) is a corporate solution, and its broad band of capabilities is affording companies the opportunity for much needed software and data rationalization. Users can now satisfy their data and software requirements with a single supplier relationship. This agreement will result in cost savings, better service, and improved on-line data delivery to users. In this regard, PIDC and SSI have taken delivery of a Compaq AlphaServer GS 140 with 12 gigabytes of RAM. It supports Oracle's Very Large Memory (VLM) capabilities, and ensures the fastest response times imaginable.
Any existing contractual obligations of all three companies will be honoured and "grandfathered". SSI will continue to train and support Petro-LAB(TM) users, and PIDC and IPL will continue to support their data. Revenue sharing will be split 50/50 between software and data. As well, SSI will take full responsibility, under separate agreements, for continuing to "model/map" proprietary databases for clients so that all corporate data is available through Petro-LAB(TM).
This agreement allows SSI to materially improve its oil and gas initiatives while providing the capital and the resources to aggressively develop its Labrador(R) initiative. The first Java
version of Labrador(R) has been released to enable the modelling and retrieval of data stored in relational databases for any industry. SSI is currently negotiating the use of Java Labrador(R) outside of the petroleum sector.
Sterne Stackhouse Inc. is a Canadian software development company,
which has been specializing in data retrieval technology for business since 1981. The company launched the Labrador(R) (Retriever) project in early 1993, and has two major business thrusts. One is to use the Labrador(R) technology to create an application suite of products for oil and gas companies, called Petro-LAB(TM). The other is to use the Labrador(R) technology as a generic data retriever in other vertical markets such as health care or finance.
PI/Dwights is an IHS Energy Group company, based in Denver and Houston. It produces the most complete and comprehensive proprietary databases of information from more than 2.9 million oil and gas wells. Most major and independent oil companies active in North America and the North Sea rely on PI/Dwights for oil and gas exploration and production information solutions.
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FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Sterne Stackhouse Inc.
Darryl Stackhouse
President & Chief Financial Officer
(403) 263-6325
INDUSTRY: SOF
SUBJECT: TMN
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