Cactus Strategies Selects FirstWorld's IDC

Denver-based Cactus Strategies has signed an agreement with FirstWorld, a provider of outsourced data center and high-speed Internet solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, to house its extensive suite of hardware, software and connectivity services in FirstWorld's Denver Internet Data Center (IDC). In addition, Cactus Strategies' customer acquisition applications will be powered by the Oracle Internet Platform hosted in FirstWorld's IDC.

Cactus Strategies specializes in helping businesses locate and acquire new customers. In today's highly competitive environment, one of the biggest challenges companies face is accurately identifying the best sales prospects in a local, regional or national marketplace. Running proprietary knowledge discovery tools, geo-spatial techniques, database analysis and data mining on servers at FirstWorld's IDC, Cactus Strategies empowers businesses of any size to analyze markets and find customers with accuracy and scope previously unavailable.

Cactus will be leveraging the Oracle Internet Platform and FirstWorld's IDC environment to manage, analyze and enhance Cactus' database of business records. The Oracle Internet Platform will play a key role in helping Cactus create a powerful B2B environment that encompasses a suite of customer identification services. Cactus's goal is to provide business customers with the ability to:

• fully exploit, enhance and manage their own customer databases
• locate the most lucrative markets
• find the best prospective customers
• generate effective marketing campaigns
• track results
• learn from every customer interaction

The FirstWorld solution supports Cactus's complex system architecture that will use both Microsoft NT and Sun Solaris operating systems to store, analyze, retrieve and deliver millions of records. In addition to enhanced security, firewall protection and redundancy for the mission-critical data, the FirstWorld IDC environment will support requirements for online e-commerce and electronic delivery of records. Cactus anticipates that over time its customers will be served more than 500 million records per month from the data center.

"We designed our data centers and application development platforms to meet the needs of growing Internet companies like Cactus Strategies that require the ability to scale quickly to meet rapidly changing customer requirements," noted Sheldon S. Ohringer, president and CEO of FirstWorld. "We are pleased that FirstWorld's state-of-the-art IDC has been chosen to house Cactus's unique data mining and warehousing capabilities and we look forward to growing with Cactus in the future."

Carl Cozine, CEO of Cactus Strategies emphasized the importance of the FirstWorld solution. "FirstWorld provides two critical components for our growing business: the Oracle Internet Platform, which is a critical development platform for our large data warehousing and real-time data mining and predictive modeling techniques; and a scalable, Web-enabled hosting solution that allows us to create a service that can easily expand as we bring our services to a national customer-base via the Internet."

About Cactus

Denver-based Cactus Strategies offers a suite of integrated customer identification and acquisition services that help companies grow. Our unique and proprietary set of information-based products and services can help any business discover and use valuable data about both prospects and customers. Application of our services can provide significant increases in sales and marketing effectiveness, and customer retention resulting in lower costs, higher revenue, and greater return on investment. For more information, visit the Cactus Strategies Web site at www.cactusstrategies.com.

About FirstWorld

FirstWorld Communications Inc, headquartered in Denver, Colo., is a full service business Internet provider with state-of-the-art Internet Data Centers, that host, monitor and maintain mission critical Web sites, ecommerce platforms and business applications for small and medium-sized businesses. In addition to its e-business solutions, FirstWorld provides broadband solutions including high-speed Internet access and digital subscriber line (DSL), as well as Web integration and consulting, and telephony. For more information, visit FirstWorld's Web site at www.firstworld.com.

Contact Carl Cozine of Cactus Strategies, 720-283-7380