Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a leading software provider, has announced that University Hospital Leuven, the largest hospital in Belgium and one of the largest university hospitals in Europe, has selected DataDirect OpenAccess software development kit (SDK) to enable it to cost-effectively migrate its database to improve information exchange with other hospitals with minimal downtime.

The University Hospital Leuven is supported by a centralized IT infrastructure that serves itself and eight other hospitals; they determined they needed to improve the information exchange between each of the hospitals and began a project to migrate their infrastructure from an existing Sybase database to an IBM DB2 system by the end of the year (2012). The DataDirect OpenAccess SDK was selected because it can convert more than 200 of the University Hospital applications to DB2, while minimizing downtime to less than one hour.

The Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK is the industry’s leading driver development kit that enables the development of custom drivers for any data source. Whether the data source is a proprietary file format or API, Open Access SDK can be used to make it SQL-accessible from ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB or ADO.NET compliant applications.

Reinoud Reinders, IT manager for Infrastructure & Operations at University Hospital Leuven, said: “In addition to high-quality healthcare, information exchange is at the core of our business, which means that finding the right solution was of great importance to us. Each of the applications to be migrated are used by physicians at the hospital and are extremely important, therefore any disruption to the way they work would have a significant impact on the hospital.”

Reinders continued: “If done incorrectly, medical records could be mixed up, patient files become unavailable and the hospital could even be forced to shut down, denying patients much needed medical care. For us, the DataDirect OpenAccess SDK from Progress Software is the perfect solution and makes a virtually impossible transition not only possible, but also simple and easily verifiable.”

Michael Benedict, vice president Product Management, Progress Software said: “We are delighted that the University Hospital in Leuven selected the Progress DataDirect OpenAccess SDK. We’re looking forward to working with them on the project, and we’re confident that they will benefit from its high performance and feature-rich functionality.”

Progress Software offers the most comprehensive line of software for connecting the world's most critical applications to data and services, running on any major platform, using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. For DataDirect customers, the company's best-in-class middleware components have become a strategic part of the software development process and IT infrastructure. More than 350 independent software vendors including seven of the top 10 vendors worldwide, and thousands of corporate IT departments rely on DataDirect® products to simplify and streamline data connectivity for on-premise and Cloud-based systems.

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) simplifies the development, deployment and management of business applications on-premise or on any Cloud, on any platform and on any device with minimal IT complexity and low total cost of ownership. Progress Software can be reached at www.progress.com or 1-781-280-4000.

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Progress, DataDirect and DataDirect Connect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Any other marks contained herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.