On The Market:

Kintana Dashboard Provides Real-Time Visibility and Control

Kintana Inc, creator of technology chain management (TCM) software that helps IT organizations run faster, cheaper, and better, announced general availability of Release 4.0, Kintana Enterprise TCM. Significant advancements to Kintana's capabilities for project management and portfolio management, plus a new product, Kintana Dashboard, build on Kintana's strengths in process and deployment automation.

Kintana is the first to deliver an enterprise application serving the IT organization -- a solution similar to what ERP or CRM provide to other parts of the business. TCM offers real-time visibility and control over IT, tying front-end management to the automation of daily activities occurring throughout the IT organization. Unlike many enterprise applications, however, Kintana can be implemented in self-funding phases, where the business realizes ROI from each phase, essentially funding the next phase of implementation.

"In today's world, IT has to do more with less, and has to reduce risk without sacrificing quality. We believe our Release 4.0 provides the most comprehensive approach to providing what IT needs more than ever: a self-funding path to higher performance IT," said Bryan Plug, chief executive officer of Kintana.

IDC estimates the worldwide potential market for TCM software licenses and maintenance (excluding consulting and services revenue) will grow to over $1.7 billion by 2005.

"As business processes have become more complex, so have the required applications, infrastructure, and IT processes," said Dick Heiman, an analyst at IDC. "To assemble and manage this complex array of technologies necessary to support a successful business, IT organizations must first implement an infrastructure for their own department. Kintana Enterprise TCM provides a comprehensive software solution to cost-effectively implement, maintain, and manage technology initiatives and operations."

"PaeTec, like Kintana, knows the importance of a high-performance IT organization," said Bob Moore, vice president of IT at PaeTec, an integrated communications provider that uses Kintana to manage and automate a host of IT services and internal business processes. PaeTec is an early adopter of Release 4.0. "Kintana has assisted PaeTec in establishing reliable processes to achieve increased IT performance. Kintana helps us reduce our deployment times for various business applications while making us more agile and more responsive to our customers."

Release 4.0, Kintana's Enterprise TCM release, introduces important new capabilities to meet pressing IT needs at both the enterprise and departmental levels, including:

• New Kintana Dashboard, providing real-time visibility and control over initiatives and operations
• Visual displays and exception reporting to highlight areas requiring attention
• Tailored to individual's role
• Ability to drill down through multiple levels of detail

Significant project management and portfolio management enhancements

• Configurable project exception rules that trigger project risk levels -- red, yellow, and green visual indicators
• Improved visibility and navigation for quick access to project information
• Project planning and scheduling
• Project templates to establish and enforce reusable processes
• Improved collaboration and project information flow among project participants

New Reporting Meta Layer to speed report generation

• Business-oriented views provide simplified access to data stored in Kintana repository
• Ability to leverage industry leading reporting tools

Improved usability & consistency across products

Enterprise-wide robustness and scalability for thousands of users, large transaction volumes, and large numbers of business processes

Internationalization capabilities

Totality, a leading provider of Application and Infrastructure Management (AIM) services for e-businesses, is another early adopter of Release 4.0. Totality plans to leverage the new release's enhanced reporting capabilities for managing client service requests.

"Kintana Enterprise 4.0 is exactly what we need," said Totality vice president of Operations Brian Davies. "Not only does it provide our internal resources better visibility into our change management processes, it should enable clients to track the status of their changes through our Web-based customer portal, TotalView. Additionally, the improved reporting in 4.0 will facilitate our ability to further automate our change management process."

About Kintana

Kintana has created the first enterprise application for Technology Chain Management, helping IT organizations work faster and smarter while saving money. Kintana's comprehensive solution manages, automates, and provides real-time visibility and control over all IT processes, improving productivity while reducing risk, time-to-market, and cost. The privately held company, founded in 1995 as Chain Link Technologies, currently serves more than 275 customers, including Cisco, Credit Suisse, Ford, and GE. Kintana is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Toronto, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Reading (UK), and Buenos Aires. For more information on Kintana's products, which have won two prestigious Crossroads A-List Awards, visit www.kintana.com, or call 1-877-KINTANA.

Pathways Builds Foundation for Successful Data Warehousing

Knightsbridge Solutions LLC announced Pathways, a comprehensive data warehousing methodology established to ensure successful and efficient data warehouse implementations. Pathways, based on best practices from over 200 data warehousing projects and best-of-breed components among leading methodologies, represents a strategic and tactical framework that puts in place standards and methods for creating a data warehouse for very large or complex data.

The Pathways methodology was created to address complex yet recurring challenges facing the Fortune 1000 firms who are typically Knightsbridge's customers, such as lack of data quality, inability to scale to meet future needs, and a warehouse that doesn't fulfill the business needs after the investment has been made. While each data warehouse solution is unique, there are certain steps which, when relied upon, can deliver consistently successful end-results and lay the groundwork for growth and expansion of the data warehouse as a resource for managing the business.

"By observing the commonalities among data warehouse projects and building a methodology that proactively addresses successes and challenges, we provide our customers with an approach that mitigates the risks associated with undertaking projects that are often multimillion dollar investments over several years," states Faisal Shah, chief technology officer for Knightsbridge Solutions. "Our customers reap the benefits of our experience through Pathways in a number of ways, such as faster and more efficient implementations, and completed projects that meet business needs and goals."

One of the keys to Pathways' success is the fundamental philosophy of its modular design, according to Tracy Cather, Knightsbridge senior principal assigned to Pathways development. "Modular design allows large projects to be easily subdivided into smaller projects and also makes Pathways adaptable to various size projects, ranging from assessments to full implementation cycles," Cather adds.

Pathways follows a three-path approach to success by addressing business, data, and technical needs individually and interdependently. Each path follows typical strategy, planning and design, and development and roll-out phases. Each path also contains iterations and checkpoints to ensure appropriate validation and sign off on deliverables and to help monitor the overall project status. Pathways emphasizes knowledge transfer, which enables clients to successfully use and maintain the data warehouse once the project is completed.

The Pathways methodology resides in the Knightsbridge Center of Excellence, which is devoted to the development of methodologies and best practices for high-performance data solutions. Knightsbridge's scalable, high-performance data infrastructures solve terabyte-class data problems and enable high-value business processes, including customer relationship management strategies, database marketing, knowledge management, and supply chain management.

About Knightsbridge Solutions LLC

Knightsbridge Solutions, www.knightsbridge.com, is a systems integration firm delivering high-performance data solutions that solve big-data problems. Our data warehousing and data infrastructure solutions empower organizations with either high data volumes or complex data challenges to leverage organizational data for competitive advantage. We specialize in data warehousing, customer data integration, cross-channel data integration, zero-latency applications, meta data architecture, batch rehosting, marketing automation and integrated supply chain. The company's existing practice areas focus in telecommunications, financial services, insurance markets, retail, and pharmaceutical and medical products.