Financial Watch:

Manna/Ecofabric Join to Deliver Personalization Technology

Manna Inc, an emerging leader in the online personalization market, announced that it has formed a partnership with Ecofabric Inc, a leading provider of hosted online commerce and marketing solutions and services. Manna's next-generation personalization solution, FrontMind, is now offered by Ecofabric as a hosted service, integrated with the Ecofabric Commerce Platform or on a stand-alone basis, to help small and mid-size companies create effective personalized e-commerce Web sites.

"FrontMind helps us to achieve our goal of providing customers with effective, innovative products to help maximize the profitability of their online businesses," said Igor Gorin, Ecofabric CEO. "The combined power of FrontMind and the Ecofabric Commerce Platform enables our customers to cost-effectively improve such key success metrics as visitor-to-buyer conversion rate, number of orders placed, and average order size."

FrontMind combines business rules, predictive technologies, and dynamic online learning to give e-marketers to ability to model customer behavior and predict the best offer to present to the right customer at the right time. When integrated with Ecofabric Commerce Platform, FrontMind technology is combined with the commerce engine and customer database, allowing companies to deliver highly targeted cross- and up-sell promotions, special merchandise, and incentives in real time. Integrated reporting tools help to immediately analyze and optimize the return on the personalization technology investment. The result is a smoothly functioning online business with highly effective customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.

"In a crowded online marketplace where less than three percent of visitors become buyers and 50 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned, FrontMind's proven, effective technology is a powerful competitive lever," said Dan Ross, Manna CEO. "Ecofabric's hosted offering makes this technology accessible and affordable to small and mid-size companies that otherwise would not have been able to benefit from this investment."

About Ecofabric Inc

Ecofabric provides outsourced technology and services to build and manage Internet commerce and marketing operations. Ecofabric's solutions enable companies to design, manage, and grow their online businesses while effectively attracting, converting, and retaining profitable customers. The company's revolutionary Ecofabric Commerce Platform (ECP) and expert services are proven to deliver both cost savings and time-to-market advantages to clients. Founded in 1998, Ecofabric is headquartered in San Francisco, California. To learn more, please visit www.ecofabric.com.

About Manna Inc

Manna Inc is a emerging leader in the development of online personalization solutions for e-business, offering e-marketers unprecedented control and management of successful e-marketing programs. FrontMind, Manna's next-generation personalization solution, uses a combination of rules, a self-learning engine, and predictive modeling technologies. Manna's professional services organization focuses its expertise on helping e-businesses meet their profitability objectives by providing prompt technical installation and configuration, robust data mining, and dedicated business consulting and analysis. Founded in 1997, Manna is headquartered near Boston, Massachusetts, with R&D located in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, contact Manna at www.mannainc.com, or at 866-MANNA-US (866-626-6287).

Contact Ecofabric Inc, Roman Martynenko, 415-206-0975 x35, roman@ecofabric.com.

FileTek/KVS Provide Enterprise-Level E-Mail Archives

FileTek Inc, a data storage and data access systems provider, announced that it has signed a technology partnership and marketing agreement with kVault Software Inc (KVS), an enterprise e-mail management systems software company. The announcement was made at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC 2001) in Orlando, where both companies are exhibiting.

This agreement, which covers all North American markets, makes it possible for KVS Enterprise Vault users to manage extremely large on-line archives, capable of retaining billions of e-mails. Coupling FileTek's StorHouse highly-scalable storage management system with Enterprise Vault provides for easy and reliable access of e-mail content spanning many years and potentially 100s of terabytes. Other technology benefits include: compliance with regulatory standards (such as SEC rule 17a), text-based "find" retrievals, relational access to sets of archived e-mails, data-duplexing, data assurance and disaster recovery options. FileTek's scaling features ensure that no degradation in access performance will occur as the archive expands.

"This is a very important and positive step for FileTek as it offers products to help the growing e-mail storage challenge many companies and civic organizations face," said Dave Daughters, FileTek's vice president of Marketing and Business Development. "KVS Enterprise Vault is an excellent product for e-mail storage and access, and when combined with StorHouse, users will benefit from an unprecedented archiving and retrieval solution. We very much look forward to working with KVS to help our current and future customers."

"As companies look to reduce the load of ever-growing volumes of messages plaguing Exchange systems, it's important that they have a compatible, comprehensive means to manage and store unstructured information," said Mary Kay Roberto, vice president of North American Operations, KVS Inc. "By combining our expertise in e-mail archiving with FileTek's storage offerings, customers will reap the benefits of reduced cost and world-class long-term e-mail management that can scale with rapidly increasing information needs."

FileTek's flagship product, StorHouse, permits access to row-level data stored across all storage media (e.g., tape, optical, magnetic disk). It transparently integrates with the most popular databases, such as Oracle, DB2 UDB, and SQL Server, and supports industry-standard gateways and data access methods. For more information, e-mail info@filetek.com or call 301-517-1823.

KVS Enterprise Vault performs as a knowledge backbone to Exchange systems by providing a secure, centralized archiving service for those systems while easing their storage burden. All archived information is indexed and may be searched and retrieved by users, who can quickly and easily find and restore individual messages and files. The entire service is controlled by corporate defined policies that allow central control of an organization's information. KVS has recently been awarded the OSA Crossroads A-List Award for "Managing Email as a Knowledge Asset."

About FileTek

FileTek Inc is a provider of data storage and access management solutions, enabling enterprises, worldwide and across multiple industry segments, to rapidly access ever-growing volumes of historical data. FileTek is headquartered at 9400 Key West Avenue, Rockville, MD 20850. Telephone: 301-251-0600. Fax: 301-251-1990. The company also has offices located in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium. Internet: www.filetek.com.

About KVS

KVS Inc, headquartered in the UK with U.S. operations located in New York City, delivers expertise in product development and consultancy for information management. The company's flagship product, Enterprise Vault, is the market's most comprehensive enterprise e-mail management system. The Vault performs as a corporate knowledge backbone to address the numerous issues concerning growing volumes of valuable e-mail messages and documentation. KVS offers additional sales support in Germany and in a number of locations in the U.S. with alliance partners and resellers across Europe, the Middle East and Australia. Web Site: www.kvsinc.com. Phone: 1-877-358-2858.

Contact Peter Abzug, FileTek Inc, pabzug@filetek.com, 301-517-1823.

Plaut Consulting Wins Contract from Walter Industries

Plaut Consulting Inc, a leading international consulting, technology integrator and services firm, announced that it has signed an agreement to host an SAP R/3 environment and Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) for Walter Industries Inc. The contract includes technical services, disaster recovery, and Basis administration/monitoring.

In early July, Plaut completed the first phase of the engagement -- an SAP BW implementation -- in rapid fashion after receiving a request from Walter Industries for hosting and management services. The next phase will be migration of Walter's hardware to Plaut's Waltham, Mass. data center, planned for later this fall.

"Our agreement with Walter Industries is an extension of an existing relationship between Plaut and Walter subsidiary U.S. Pipe and Foundry Company," said Paul Shaughnessy, president and CEO, Plaut Consulting Inc. "We were gratified for the opportunity to step in with an immediate solution for Walter, and look forward to the next phase of implementation."

The Business Information Warehouse solution will allow Walter Industries, a diversified company with four principal operating companies, to efficiently consolidate its financial reporting and planning. The system also has the capability to be used for the collection of other data in the future, such as sales totals for specific products.

"From the beginning, we've been very impressed by the rapid response from the entire Plaut Consulting team," said Bonnie VanOverbeke, CIO of Walter Industries. "We anticipate a successful engagement and an ongoing, rewarding business relationship."

About Walter Industries Inc

Walter Industries Inc, which has revenues of $2.0 billion, is a leader in homebuilding and home financing; water transmission products; energy services and specialty aluminum products. Based in Tampa, Florida, the company employs approximately 7,000. For additional information, visit the corporate Web site at www.walterind.com.

About Plaut Consulting Inc

Plaut Consulting Inc is the U.S. subsidiary of Plaut AG, an independent, internationally operating, management consulting group with a global presence of 34 subsidiaries in 18 countries. As a full solution provider offering a suite of services from strategy consulting to IT outsourcing, and with sales revenues amounting to EUR 291 million (in 2000), it is one of the leading management consulting companies worldwide. Headquartered just outside Boston in Waltham, Mass., Plaut Consulting also maintains offices in Atlanta, Alabama, San Francisco and Toronto. Plaut Consulting Inc clients include Redbull, Brown Forman, U.S. Pipe and ABB. More information about Plaut Consulting is available at www.plaut.com.

Contact Plaut Consulting Inc, Asha N. May, 781-768-0500, may@plaut.com.

Quadstone's First for First National Bank

One of the largest finance houses in the UK, First National Bank, has turned to Quadstone to help them to deliver the right product and service to meet each individual customer's requirements. Quadstone's predictive marketing software has been installed in both the First National Consumer Finance and First National Motor Finance divisions. The software will help the bank analyze millions of customer records and so build accurate predictions of the value of each customer relationship, and the likelihood that new products can be sold to increase the banks profitability.

Owned by Abbey National, First National Bank is one of the leading finance houses in the UK, lending around £5 billion per year to consumers and businesses. Through intermediaries such as independent financial advisors (IFAs), brokers, high street retailers and car dealerships, First National services over four million customers.

Over recent years, the financial services market has seen a dramatic rise in competitive activity including reduced rate credit cards, wider offering of unsecured loans and other enticements such as balance transfer and loan consolidation deals. First National recognized that in order to maintain their market leading position, they needed to build a more detailed picture of their customers' behavior. Armed with this new customer knowledge, First National is now better placed to deliver the right product and service to meet each individual customer's requirements.

Quadstone was evaluated against three other competitive solutions. Quadstone's software has been designed to empower business and marketing users rather than technical statisticians, allowing them to create customer predictions within the context of their business expertise and company knowledge. It is this business user focus combined with speed of analysis -- Quadstone's high performance computing techniques allow interactive analysis of millions of customer records -- and flexible visualization tools that gave Quadstone the edge over its competitors.

Pravina Ladva, CRM Program Manager at First National Consumer Finance states: "Quadstone will be a key element of our CRM program that will allow us to intelligently use our existing data to make effective business decisions. We will then be in a better position to develop and improve the strong relationships we have already established with both our customers and our intermediaries."

"Measuring, understanding and predicting customer interactions is the key to driving long term value from investments in customer management infrastructures," comments Mark Smith, president, Quadstone. "Using data to understand how your customers are behaving today, and predict their behavior tomorrow, allows organizations to take a more directed approach to marketing. Without forward-looking analytics it just becomes guesswork, and in today's economic climate who wants to trust their business to guesswork? Thought leaders like First National understand this, and will use this understanding to extend their competitive advantage."

"With clients such as Barclays, Bank of Ireland and Marshal & Ilsley Bank we have demonstrated our ability enhance revenues from improved customer management across the range of response, retention, risk and ROI applications. We are delighted to add another top tier financial services organization to our client roster and we look forward to working with First National," Smith concludes.

About Quadstone

Quadstone helps companies maximize customer value and generate increased financial returns by understanding, predicting and influencing customer behaviour in and across all channels. Quadstone offers software and services for specific industries, touchpoints and applications. These solutions improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which marketing users can address issues of customer retention, ROI, risk and response.

Quadstone's international clients include market leaders in the financial services, retail/e-tail, telecommunications and marketing services sectors and include CVS, GUS, Fingerhut, Barclays and Vodafone amongst others. Founded in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1995, Quadstone also has offices in London, England and Boston, Massachusetts. For more information visit www.quadstone.com.

Contact Fiona Neil, Quadstone, 617-753-7393, fiona.neil@quadstone.com.