Financial Watch:

ACS Selected by Oregon to Supply DSSURS

ACS, a premier provider of business process and information technology outsourcing solutions, announced that it had signed a $4.98 million, five-year contract with the Oregon Department of Human Resources, Office of Medical Assistance Programs for the design and implementation of its Decision Support/Surveillance and Utilization Review System (DSSURS) and supporting data warehouse.

The State of Oregon processes over 7.5 million claim records annually, and Oregon's Department of Human Resources has critical needs to identify and implement the right technology and business processes to effectively manage its infrastructure. The ACS team will be responsible for designing, developing, implementing, and maintaining a Data Warehouse System that will provide the framework for decision support, comparative analysis and reporting. Additionally, ACS will be working closely with Office of Medical Assistance Programs staff to ensure that all users and support staff are fully trained in the use of the new system.

ACS' Decision Support Systems (DSS) Group is a leader in providing data warehousing and DSS, and currently has clients throughout the United States, in both the public and private sector.

"Medical assistance is Oregon's largest human services program, having served more than one million Oregonians since 1994," said Hersh Crawford, state Medicaid director. "This is an important element of our goal to improve client services."

"ACS is committed to developing a DSSURS that can be showcased as a comprehensive, state-of-the-art, usable solution that not only addresses Oregon's present needs, but will also serve as a lasting legacy," said Harvey V. Braswell, Group president of ACS' Government Services. "The new DSSURS will positively impact the Oregon Medicaid Program for many years, and we are happy to be playing such a critical role in the State's ability to be prepared for future programmatic and technological needs."

ACS, a Fortune 1000 company with more than 30,000 people in 29 countries, provides business process and technology outsourcing solutions to world-class commercial and government clients. The company's Class A common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "ACS". ACS makes technology work. Visit ACS on the Internet at www.acs-inc.com.

Contact Lesley Pool, vice president/Chief Marketing Officer, 214-841-8028, lesley.pool@acs-inc.com, of ACS Inc.

Dominion Selects SAS for Risk Management

Dominion, one of the nation's leading electric power and natural gas companies, has selected SAS Institute to provide a risk management solution for the company's energy marketing and trading operations.

SAS, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, is a market leader in enterprise intelligence and data warehousing.

"Dominion's risk management system, powered by SAS' Risk Dimensions, gives our executives and traders the information they need to make more timely and more accurate business decisions," said John Shaw, senior vice president of financial management at Dominion. "The SAS risk management solution also supplies answers more quickly than ever. What used to take us weeks now takes us days, hours or even minutes."

Dominion has implemented Risk Dimensions, SAS' comprehensive risk management software solution, to identify and manage the risk inherent in trading natural gas, oil, electricity and other energy commodity contracts. Risk Dimensions helps Dominion analyze and mitigate the effect of variables that can affect energy prices -- and Dominion's earnings -- including changes in customer demand, power production and energy costs.

Analysts at Dominion employ Risk Dimensions to construct predictive models and what-if scenarios. These models reveal the potential business effects of countless combinations of events. Dominion executives can then devise business strategies and commodity trading plans that not only limit their business risks, but also allow them to exploit risk to the company's advantage.

To make informed decisions, Dominion needs thousands of data elements from a multitude of systems. A single risk model, for example, might require information about production plant gas consumption, hourly energy usage, customer demand per region, and future demand given different weather scenarios and rate changes. Before Risk Dimensions, Dominion analysts had to collect all this data from dozens of different programs.

With Risk Dimensions, Dominion analysts create daily and monthly reports for the company's executives and calculate specific risk statistics for commodity traders. In addition to these static reports, the system delivers a full view of the company's risk portfolio via the corporate intranet. Executives and managers with access can discover up-to-the-minute information about the company's risk picture.

"Risk Dimensions transforms the vast amounts of data generated by an organization into intelligence, so decision makers can react to quickly changing market conditions, rapidly identify new strategic directions, and uncover sources of potential problems before they materialize," said Sam Harris, SAS' global strategist for risk management. "We're pleased that Dominion has chosen SAS to deliver risk-based intelligence and provide it with a competitive edge."

About Risk Dimensions

SAS' Risk Dimensions, www.sas.com/solutions/riskmgmt, is a comprehensive, packaged software solution designed to re-engineer and accelerate the risk-management process. It leverages SAS' industry-leading analytical and data warehousing technology to help firms compute and communicate different market and credit risk measures. Risk Dimensions gives energy and financial firms the ability to:

• Access and consolidate position and market data from virtually any format, system or location.
• Analyze and explore that data in order to compute risk measures.
• Communicate these risk measures effectively to business users and decision-makers.

About Dominion

Dominion, with headquarters in Richmond, Va., is one of the nation's largest energy producers. The company maintains a power-generation portfolio of more than 22,000 megawatts, one of the largest independent natural gas and oil production companies, a major pipeline and the nation's largest underground natural gas storage system. It has annual revenues of US$10 billion. With these and other assets, Dominion serves nearly 4 million retail natural gas and electric customers throughout the eastern United States. For more information about Dominion, visit the company's Web site at www.dom.com.

About SAS

SAS provides software and services that enable customers to transform data from all areas of their business into intelligence. SAS solutions help organizations make better, more informed decisions and maximize customer, supplier, and organizational relationships. Solutions from SAS, one of the world's largest privately held software companies, are used at more than 37,000 business, government and university sites around the world. Customers include 98 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500, and 90 percent of the Fortune 500 overall. For 25 years, SAS has been giving our customers The Power to Know. For more information, visit www.sas.com.

Contact SAS Institute, Mike Nemecek, 919-531-5140, Mike.Nemecek@sas.com.

EUROFORUM Takes Control with DataCore's SANsymphony

DataCore Software Corporation, a leading provider of storage virtualization and networking software, announced that EUROFORUM GmbH, one of Europe's leading organizers of major events, conferences and seminars, has chosen SANsymphony from DataCore. EUROFORUM has radically improved its Düsseldorf datacenter with the successful implementation of a Storage Area Network (SAN) based on storage virtualization technology provided by DataCore Software.

Recognizing the challenges of meeting the increasing demands for security and growing volumes of data generated by e-mail, Internet and database applications, EUROFORUM has decided to invest in a comprehensive restructuring program for its data center infrastructure in which a SAN plays an important role. Throughout 2001, EUROFORUM will have organized more than 1,000 events, conferences and seminars that primarily target managers and decision-makers in business, science, politics, and administration. Therefore a powerful, scalable and cost-effective approach to its growing storage needs was required.

The SANsymphony virtualization solution from DataCore Software was the natural choice for the management of all of EUROFORUM's storage components. As an innovative supplier of virtualization solutions for network storage, DataCore's SANsymphony solution provides the hardware-independent management platform for EUROFORUM's Fibre Channel SAN. The software has been a compelling choice for the business, as it provides comprehensive redundancy and high availability features that are indispensable for administering the continually growing data volumes generated at EUROFORUM.

"Our company's expansion required fundamental restructuring of the IT infrastructure. We were looking for a comprehensive virtualization solution with a bulletproof storage architecture that could guarantee us secure backup and rapid disaster recovery. SANsymphony is the ideal solution for us," says Marcus Fritsche, manager of the Information Systems department at EUROFORUM. "Of course, the DataCore solution has yet another advantage for EUROFORUM: SANsymphony is hardware-independent and gives us complete freedom to make decisions about future storage-related investments, upgrades, and expansions."

With SANsymphony, centralized management and allocation of resources in a storage network are as simple as drag and drop. In addition, SANsymphony provides other important features for company-wide data security, such as snapshots, fail-over, mirroring, remote copy in SAN, or asynchronous data mirroring across LAN and WAN networks. DataCore's solution enables booting out of the SAN and supports disaster recovery that takes only minutes to complete. During backup, the data is mirrored in the background between two storage domain servers (SDS), independent of the hosts and LAN. The SDS "Powered by DataCore" are standard commercial servers and form the SANsymphony platform.

"The tremendous level of functionality provided by DataCore's SANsymphony software makes it an ideal solution for use in medium-sized and large companies," according to Manfred Gramlich, regional sales director at DataCore Software. "The pure software approach comes with many advantages for users, like EUROFORUM, who expect continuing growth. Firstly, it can act today to equip its SAN with high-end performance features at a comparably low price. Secondly, it retains the flexibility it needs to react to future developments in the market for storage media."

About EUROFORUM Deutschland GmbH

EUROFORUM Deutschland GmbH is one of the leading companies for conferences, seminars, and yearly events. The company entered the German market in 1990. Now with over 220 employees, their plans for 2001 already include more than 1060 events in over 20 different subjects. EUROFORUM Deutschland GmbH is a member of the Euroforum Group and belongs to the Informa Group plc (London), a publicly listed media company for finance and economic information. Informa is present in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, Singapore, Australia, the USA, and other countries. Their product range includes more than 5,000 media products, ranging from Lloyd's List, the oldest daily newspaper in the world (founded in 1734), to GSM World Congress, the world's largest mobile communications congress.

About DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation is a leader in storage virtualization and networking software. The company's award-winning SANsymphony(tm) storage control software dramatically improves ROI and storage utilization by converting "islands" of disparate storage into networked storage pools, enabling the easy allocation of storage capacity. DataCore distributes its software products through the SANvantage Partner Program including its authorized and technical channel and major OEM partners worldwide. Founded in 1998 by some of the industry's most respected storage technologists, DataCore is privately-held with headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and other US offices located in NY, CA, IL, and NC with international sales and service operations located in London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, and Sydney. For more information visit www.datacore.com.

Contact DataCore Software Corporation, Bharat Kumar, Tel: 0118 949 7024, Bharat.kumar@datacoresoftware.com.

J.Crew Deploys digiMine Data Mining Solutions

digiMine Inc, a leading provider of data mining business solutions, announced that apparel, shoes and accessories leader J.Crew has deployed a suite of digiMine solutions, including Web site analytics and real-time cross-sell and up-sell applications.

To maximize marketing effectiveness, Web site merchandising and online revenues, J.Crew now uses digiMine Analytic Solutions for valuable insights and decision support about online customer interactions. To help the retailer maintain a high level of customer satisfaction and grow sales, digiMine is also providing J.Crew with predictive data mining technology to deliver product recommendations to jcrew.com customers. These recommendations can be viewed today at www.jcrew.com.

"J.Crew required a comprehensive solution to close the data management, mining and business intelligence loop for our online business. Our goal was to find the right partner to help us use our business data for a better understanding of our customers, deliver the best possible online experience and grow revenues," says Jayson Kim, Senior Director of Web Marketing Applications, J.Crew Group. "After evaluating a number of vendors and systems, we identified digiMine Analytic Solutions as the ideal approach. digiMine's data mining and business intelligence solutions will help us better market our site and offerings, more effectively merchandise our products and continue to grow our online business."

For jcrew.com, a key component to meeting its goals is delivering dynamic, relevant product recommendations to shoppers that will increase average order size and raise customer satisfaction and loyalty. digiMine's next-generation data mining solutions were the right fit, providing powerful data management and analysis to drive effective recommendations, as well as compatibility and simple integration with the jcrew.com Web architecture. Now every shopper at jcrew.com can view compelling apparel, shoe or accessory suggestions, contextually based on their browsing and purchasing behavior.

By managing and applying sophisticated data mining to J.Crew's data, digiMine also delivers critical decision support to jcrew.com for more effective Web site design, marketing and merchandising strategies. digiMine's daily, Web-based reports provide J.Crew managers with analysis of Web site traffic patterns, product purchase trends, customer demographics and marketing campaign response. As a fully managed solution, digiMine Analytic Solutions provide J.Crew marketers and executives with actionable business intelligence while minimizing resource and infrastructure expenses.

jcrew.com was one of the first apparel Web sites, pioneering the transformation from traditional retailer to the world of e-commerce. J.Crew's fastest growing distribution channel, jcrew.com has established a powerful online presence. Jcrew.com is a dynamic, sophisticated e-commerce site that constantly changes schema, design and inventory. digiMine Analytic Solutions adapt and scale to the evolution of jcrew.com, by integrating, warehousing and analyzing high volumes of data, including Web traffic "clickstream," customer profiles, product catalog and marketing campaign data, such as email campaigns.

"As a leader in e-retail and online customer service, J.Crew understands the value and necessity of harnessing the power of business data," said Nick Besbeas, digiMine's Chief Strategy Officer. "By selecting digiMine, J.Crew extends its leadership through better insight to the interests and needs of its customers, while avoiding the resource and time investments normally associated with sophisticated data mining solutions."

About digiMine

digiMine is setting new standards for the delivery of powerful data mining and analytics. Our managed data mining solutions transform raw data into actionable business intelligence for more profitable marketing campaigns, sales interactions and customer relationships. Our solutions are powered by a fully managed data warehouse and delivered via the Internet, providing fast deployment, a low total cost of ownership and outstanding return on investment. For additional information about digiMine call 425-460-5000 or visit the company Web site at www.digiMine.com.

Contact digiMine, Joel Sider, 425-216-1842, joels@digimine.com.

Tricon Global Restaurants Chooses Teradata

Tricon Global Restaurants Inc, owner of the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC brands, has become the first quick-service restaurant business to begin implementing a global enterprise data warehouse. The agreement with Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, includes professional services, software and hardware. The Teradata warehouse enhances customer satisfaction and drives increased restaurant efficiency by performing complex analyses of customer behavior, product performance and promotions effectiveness.

"The creation of a global data warehouse will optimize operating efficiencies throughout our organization," said Aylwin Lewis, chief operating officer, Tricon. "We will be able to enhance planning and analysis, generate better data consistency and produce major economies of scale," added Lewis. Tricon selected Teradata based on its retail expertise and strong track record.

The Teradata warehouse will be used as the foundation for a number of applications, including sales and consumer promotions analysis, menu mix management and product introductions, as well as to segment and analyze customer purchase behavior across the Tricon brands.

"Teradata further enables companies like Tricon to analyze their business from both a global and local perspective," said Darryl McDonald, vice president of retail enterprise solutions for Teradata. "Teradata can handle the massive volume of information from thousands of restaurant locations."

About Tricon

Tricon Global Restaurants Inc, based in Louisville, Ky., is the world's largest restaurant company in terms of system units with over 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries and territories. The company's brands -- KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell -- are the global leaders of the chicken, pizza and Mexican-style restaurant categories, respectively. Total worldwide system retail sales for the brands were over $22 billion in 2000.

About Teradata Division

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, offers powerful analytical solutions that help businesses drive growth. Teradata solutions include the Teradata database, and analytical applications for customer relationship management, operations and financial management, business performance management and e-business. To learn more about Teradata Division and its solutions, go to www.Teradata.com.

About NCR Corporation

NCR Corporation is a leader in providing Relationship Technology* solutions to customers worldwide. NCR's Relationship Technology solutions include the Teradata* database and analytical applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and demand chain management, store automation systems and automated teller machines (ATMs). The company's business solutions are built on the foundation of its long-established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, global customer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and leading edge hardware technology. NCR employs 32,900 in more than 100 countries, and is a component stock of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. More information about NCR and its solutions may be found at www.ncr.com.