Symyx Enhances Software With OpenEye Technology

Addition of Structure-to-Name Conversion Toolkit Will Enhance Chemical Compound Searching and Improve Productivity for Researchers Using Symyx® Applications

SANTA CLARA, CA and SANTA FE, NM–(EMWNews – August 6, 2008) – In an extension of its

strategic partnership, Symyx Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMMX) plans to

integrate OpenEye’s Lexichem™ structure-name converter software with

Symyx Draw and other key solutions including the soon-to-be-released Symyx

Isentris® 3.1 informatics system. This integration will enhance and

accelerate chemical compound searching by enabling chemists to generate

structures for query or other purposes simply by providing chemical names

rather than drawing the structures. This time-saving capability initially

will be incorporated into the upcoming release of the Symyx Draw structure

editor.

“OpenEye products are complementary with Symyx solutions and by working

together we will provide our customers with best-of-breed functionality,”

said Dr. Trevor Heritage, President of Symyx Software. “This partnership

creates greater flexibility within discovery workflows through improved

efficiency in converting chemical names to chemical structures and vice

versa. We look forward to a long-standing relationship with our colleagues

at OpenEye Scientific Software.”

“With Symyx, OpenEye’s outstanding cheminformatics will gain a larger

audience,” said Dr. Matthew Stahl, Senior Vice President and Head of

Strategic Development at OpenEye Scientific Software. “The breadth of Symyx

software solutions and their diverse customer base presents us with an

outstanding opportunity to further temper our software. It has been a

pleasure working with an industry leader like Symyx, and we anticipate

strengthening our relationship in the future.”

As part of a continued program to extend the range of files supported by

Symyx Draw software to include popular chemical structure formats, Symyx

will incorporate file converters from OpenEye’s OEChem programming library

for chemistry and cheminformatics into Symyx Draw. This integration will

enable Symyx Draw to read and write ChemDraw (CDX), canonical SMILES™

and a number of other file formats.

As part of this agreement, Prous Science, part of the scientific business

of Thomson Reuters, and Symyx are extending to OpenEye access to the MDDR

database, the leading bioactivity database jointly produced by Symyx and

the scientific business of Thomson Reuters, for use in validating OpenEye’s

various scientific algorithms. OpenEye will also be able to validate their

models against the well-known Symyx Comprehensive Medicinal Chemistry

database (Elsevier).

About OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc.

OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc. is a privately held company headquartered

in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and

Strasbourg, France. It was founded in 1997 to develop large-scale modeling

applications and toolkits. Primarily geared towards drug discovery and

design, areas of application include chemical informatics, structure

generation, docking, shape comparison, charge & electrostatics and

visualization. The software is designed for scientific rigor, as well as

speed, scalability and platform independence. OpenEye makes most of its

technology available as toolkits — programming libraries suitable for

custom development. OpenEye software typically is distributable across

multiple processors, supports 64-bit processing, and runs on Linux, Windows

and Mac OS X, as well as IBM and SUN flavors of UNIX. For further

information on the company and its products, see http://www.eyesopen.com.

For more information, please contact: [email protected]

About Symyx

Symyx Technologies, Inc. is the scientific R&D integration partner to

companies in the life sciences, chemicals, energy, electronics and consumer

products industries. With scientific R&D under tremendous economic and

technical pressure, we help companies reduce R&D risk and enhance R&D

productivity to help them bring more and better products to market quickly

and cost-effectively. Our integrated technology platform combines

electronic laboratory notebooks, content, laboratory logistics and analysis

available from Symyx Software, software-driven integrated workflows

available from Symyx Tools and collaborative research and directed services

from Symyx Research Services to support the entire R&D process. In October

2007, Symyx acquired MDL Information Systems, Inc., a leading provider of

innovative informatics software, databases and services that accelerate

successful scientific R&D by improving the speed and quality of scientists’

decision making. Information about Symyx, including reports and other

information filed by Symyx with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is

available at www.symyx.com.

Symyx and Isentris are registered trademarks of Symyx Technologies, Inc.

All rights reserved. Lexichem is a trademark of OpenEye Scientific

Software, Inc. Prous Science is a registered trademark in the United States

of Prous Science, S.A.U. The MDDR database contains material belonging to

Prous Science, S.A.U., © Copyright 1989-2008. SMILES is a trademark of

Daylight Chemical Information Systems, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned

in this document are the property of their respective owners.

For more information: Derek Brookmeyer Racepoint Group on behalf of Symyx Technologies, Inc. (415) 694-6702