September 21, 2001 – Billerica, MA – PRI Automation, Inc. (PRI), will continue its use of Compaq Computer Corporation’s OpenVMS platform. PRI will migrate its industry-leading and award-winning PROMIS manufacturing execution system (MES) software product to future Compaq Itanium-based OpenVMS systems. PROMIS, an MES software platform, is central to PRI Automation’s P300 factory management integrated software solution that provides a complete CIM system for semiconductor and integrated circuit manufacturers.

“We will support Compaq’s OpenVMS platform into the foreseeable future and in fact have several important updates that we will be announcing soon that will continue to add value to the PROMIS product set as semiconductor manufacturing transitions to 300mm wafers,” said Jim Golden, vice president, Factory Management Software for PRI.

“OpenVMS is proven in manufacturing systems all over the world owing to its reliability, scalability and excellent performance,” said Richard Vatcher, vice president of PRI’s Software Division. “It will continue to allow the PROMIS dual machine and high availability modules to provide virtually non- stop manufacturing operations to our OpenVMS customer base. With Compaq’s commitment to port OpenVMS to the Intel Itanium processor family, this will ensure that PROMIS will be a viable solution for many more years.”

PRI will be one of the first suppliers to receive Compaq’s OpenVMS Itanium-based hardware to begin the port. Both Compaq and Intel have committed significant joint resources and technology in bringing Compaq operating system environments and applications portfolios to Itanium-based enterprise servers.