Financial Watch:

China Construction Bank Selects Teradata

China Construction Bank has selected Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, to build the first enterprise data warehouse in China's banking history.

The bank is hoping to accelerate the modernization of China's banking industry and raise competitiveness by adopting Teradata's leading enterprise data warehousing technology.

The first phase of the project will centralize all the bank's data across business functions and branches. The system also relies on the Teradata data warehouse to develop related applications such as customer relationship management and Teradata Value Analyzer to analyze customer profitability.

China Construction Bank selected Teradata after testing and evaluating several multinational vendors at the initial planning stage. Teradata enterprise data warehousing solutions were found to provide unparalleled analytical power and high scalability of massively parallel-processing servers. Teradata was also chosen for its extensive experience in the financial services sector and the customization of Teradata's solutions for the China market.

"Teradata enterprise data warehousing solutions have been selected by 25 of the world's top 100 banks," said Cliff Wu, vice president and managing director of Teradata, Greater China. "Teradata's expertise in the global banking industry will offer the strongest support to the modernization of China Construction Bank's infrastructure."

According to Randy Wang, general manager of NCR Teradata China, "China's entry into the World Trade Organization will bring significant challenges to China's financial industry. Many leading banks have planned to build their own management information systems, and China Construction Bank will be a model for them to follow. Teradata will offer the world's best data warehousing experts to ensure that this project is implemented smoothly."

The China Construction Bank project is the third terabyte-class enterprise data warehousing project that Teradata is implementing in mainland China, which further indicates Teradata's bright future in developing the data warehouse market. Teradata has also helped Shanghai Securities Central Clearance and Registration Company and TravelSky Technology Limited in China.

About China Construction Bank

China Construction Bank (CCB) is the third-largest state-owned commercial bank in China, with business focusing on medium- and long-term lending. Headquartered in Beijing, CCB conducts operations across the territory of China with more than 20,000 branches as well as in major international financial centers including Hong Kong, London, New York, Frankfort, Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul. Fortune global 500 ranked CCB as the 53rd largest commercial bank in the world with US$12,616 million revenue 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 people 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.

Contact Holly Michael of NCR Corporation, 937-445-6086, or holly.michael@ncr.com.

Answerthink to Develop Exelon Financial Management System

Answerthink Inc announced that it has been selected by Exelon Corporation to design and implement a financial and management reporting system. Exelon, one of the nation's largest electric utilities companies, was formed with the merger of PECO Energy Company and Unicom Corporation last year.

As part of Exelon's post-merger integration, the company hired Answerthink to help them design a unified process and system to streamline financial information from PECO's and Unicom's legacy systems. Based on Peoplesoft8 technology, the new system will help Exelon integrate and transform their Finance organization. The project will also include the development of enhanced business intelligence for financial planning and analysis and performance reporting driven by an integrated data architecture and operational data warehouse. The new data warehouse environment will be the foundation for the company's enterprise data warehousing operations.

"This financial and management reporting system is an integral part of our overall Finance transformation and post-merger integration strategy," said Ruth Ann Gillis, senior vice president and Chief Financial Officer, Exelon Corporation. "The system gives us additional capabilities that in both the near and long term will enable us to be more efficient."

"We teamed with Answerthink because they brought a unique combination of capabilities to the project, including business process intelligence, Peoplesoft configuration expertise, data warehouse and technology architecture experience and large scale program management and integration skills," said Honorio Padron, president and CEO, Exelon Business Services Company. "Answerthink's previous successful work for PECO also contributed to our decision to partner with them on this important initiative."

"Answerthink has helped many leading companies like Exelon through large merger integration efforts," said Ted A. Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of Answerthink. "Working in a collaborative environment with Exelon, our teams are taking a hands-on approach to designing the new system to help ensure that the technology is closely aligned with the way the Finance organization will operate. We're excited to partner with Exelon and help them transform their integrated Finance organization."

About Answerthink

Answerthink Inc, www.Answerthink.com, is a leading provider of technology-enabled business transformation solutions. The company brings together multi-disciplinary expertise in benchmarking and research, business transformation, interactive marketing, business applications and technology integration to serve the needs of Global 2000 clients. Answerthink's solutions span all functional areas of a company including finance, human resources, information technology, sales, marketing, customer service, and supply chain, as well as across a variety of industry sectors. Founded in 1997, Answerthink has more than 1,300 associates and offices in 17 cities throughout the United States and in Europe.

About Exelon

Exelon Corporation is one of the nation's largest electric utilities with approximately five million customers and more than $15 billion in annual revenues. The company has one of the industry's largest portfolios of electricity generation capacity, with a nationwide reach and strong positions in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Exelon distributes electricity to approximately five million customers in Illinois and Pennsylvania and gas to 425,000 customers in the Philadelphia area. The company also has holdings in such competitive businesses as energy, infrastructure services and energy services. Exelon is headquartered in Chicago.

Contact Kristin Friel, Answerthink Inc, 917-522-5223, kfriel@answerthink.com.

Kaidara/Blue Martini Alliance to Extend Blue Martini eCRM

Kaidara, a leading provider of global advisory software, and Blue Martini Software Inc, a provider of external customer relationship management (eCRM) applications, announced an alliance to provide manufacturers with case-based reasoning (CBR) technology to enable greater customer service, reduced cost and enhanced efficiency.

The alliance will focus on integrating Kaidara's Advisor software suite with Blue Martini Manufacturing, a new solution announced recently. Under the terms of the agreement, both companies will work together to jointly develop, market and sell the combined solution globally.

Blue Martini Manufacturing is a vertically-focused solution that enables manufacturers to deploy customer and partner self-service portals for better marketing, sales and service through their direct and indirect distribution channels. Kaidara Advisor will augment Blue Martini Software's guided selling capabilities by enabling manufacturers to improve the efficiency of their customer support personnel, equipment users, suppliers, and maintenance contractors. Kaidara Advisor enables manufacturers to use past experiences to reduce costs and increase productivity in everyday work scenarios. It also allows manufacturer's individual maintenance or customer support personnel to quickly access and analyze former case studies that apply to current situation analysis.

"Blue Martini Software is a valued partner and its customers will benefit greatly from Kaidara's CBR technology combined with Blue Martini Software's powerful sell-side applications," said Dr. Michel Manago, CEO of Kaidara. "Blue Martini's advanced data mining technologies combined with Kaidara's automated responses and diagnostics will lead the market for personalized business-to-business self service."

"Our strategy to help manufacturers leverage the Internet for better marketing, sales and service to consumers and their channel partners is augmented by our ecosystem of best-of-breed technology and platform partners," said Chip Overstreet, vice president of corporate marketing and business development at Blue Martini Software. "The addition of Kaidara's capabilities to Blue Martini's eCRM application suite will enable our manufacturing customers to offer more sophisticated and cost-effective levels of self-service to their customers and business partners."

About Kaidara

Kaidara is a leading provider of global advisory software for designing, manufacturing, selling and supporting complex products. Kaidara's software enables smart multi-channel interactions between an enterprise and its customers, employees and partners. It helps enterprises buy, sell, make and fix products by searching and learning from structured and unstructured data. Clients include CFM International, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Freightliner, General Motors, Legrand, National Semiconductor, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Rue du Commerce, Schneider Electric, Solectron-Ericsson, and Wartsila NSD. Kaidara is located in Los Altos, California and Paris. For more information, visit www.kaidara.com.

About Blue Martini Software

Blue Martini Software provides eCRM applications for profitable marketing and selling across all channels, including Websites, wireless devices, email and stores. Blue Martini applications help companies lower costs and increase revenues by automating content and catalog management, direct marketing, interactive selling, channel-enablement and customer service. Blue Martini Software serves customer-focused global leaders in retail, manufacturing and consumer goods. Blue Martini Software can be reached at 650-356-4000 or www.bluemartini.com.

Contact Kaidara, Tatyana Kanzaveli, 650-417-2351, tkanzaveli@Kaidara.com.

OdySoft Partners with Speedware to Enhance CRM Solution

Speedware, a leading provider of business intelligence solutions, announced a strategic partnership with OdySoft to integrate Speedware's reporting and analytic software into OdySoft's CRM workforce management system. Speedware's business intelligence reporting and analytics suite will provide OdySoft's call center system with high quality reporting and graphical analytics tools for enhanced decision- making and improved workforce management.

OdySoft's workforce management solution, Calabrio, provides call center decision-makers with forecasting, scheduling and tracking capabilities. Speedware business intelligence has been integrated into Calabrio to provide users with powerful Web-based query, reporting, OLAP and data mining functionality, enabling their CRM solution to dramatically reduce report generation time, develop critical labor insights, and improve labor scheduling decisions.

"We selected Speedware because of their complete range of business intelligence products and services," said Gilles Plourde, vice president Business Development, OdySoft. "We want to offer our customers the most comprehensive CRM solution by adding the analytical and decisional component required to analyze and report on workforce activity within the call center market."

"Our suite of reporting and analysis tools enables today's knowledge workers to turn operational data into powerful business and customer intelligence," said Andy Kulakowski, Chief Operating Officer, Speedware. "OdySoft's CRM solution is more powerful with the addition of Esperant and Media, giving users immediate access to workforce management information and adding valuable reporting and analysis capabilities to maximize call center service."

About OdySoft

OdySoft is a Montreal based software supplier of workforce management tools for call centers. Calbrio, OdySoft's CRM solution, is designed to optimize call center efficiency by managing agent availability, analyzing real time daily productivity and monitoring service trends. OdySoft is dedicated to workforce management and offers systems development, integration, planning, training and support. In operation for over 5 years, OdySoft has been providing multilingual workforce management solutions to call centers in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, France and South America.

About Speedware

Speedware Corporation Inc is a leading provider of application development technology, business intelligence software and wireless Internet solutions. With headquarters in Montreal and a distribution network spanning 35 countries, Speedware offers market leaders the end-to-end solutions they need to enhance their competitive advantage. Celebrating 25 years in business, Speedware provides professional consulting services and award-winning support to ensure its customers' ongoing success. For more information, visit Speedware Corporation at www.speedware.com.

Contact Jennifer Fisher, Speedware Corporation, 514-747-7007, jfisher@speedware.com.

OuterBay/Quest Software Deliver Real-Time Data Archiving

OuterBay Technologies, provider of software products for mastering applications and database data growth, and Quest Software Inc, a leading provider of application management solutions, announced their formal alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, OuterBay and Quest will participate in joint sales and marketing activities beginning the first quarter of 2002. By combining OuterBay's application data archiving with Quest's real-time replication, customers will gain real-time, high performance, low cost, and easily administered access to historical data for reporting, analysis, and audit requirements. In addition, customers will benefit with higher performance in production, mission-critical transaction systems.

The integration of OuterBay's LiveArchive data management solution and Quest's SharePlex data replication solution means that customers can gain the significant performance benefits of each product while simplifying their infrastructure, reducing cost and providing business users a one-stop archive and real-time reporting environment. OuterBay's LiveArchive improves performance by allowing customers to shrink the size of their production database by removing historical data and at the same time providing user access to history data in an online archive database. Quest's SharePlex improves performance of online transaction processing applications by allowing customers to shift reporting and query load to a real time reporting replica database. The integrated implementation of LiveArchive and SharePlex will allow customers to create a single combined archive and real time reporting environment.

"The benefits of an integrated real time reporting and archive environment are well worth looking at," said Sean Meighan, Manager of Performance and Architecture at Sun Micro Systems. "The integration of Quest's SharePlex and OuterBay's LiveArchive has the potential to reduce storage and operations costs and provide a value add to the business user by reducing the number of places they have to look for data."

"Managing massive amounts of transactional and historical data, while meeting the real-time reporting requirements of users are enormous challenges for today's IT managers," said Rich Butterfield, CEO of OuterBay Technologies. "The integration of LiveArchive and SharePlex means customers will have a powerful solution that dramatically improves application performance and provides complete access to both current transactions and history data in a single database."

"By using the combination of OuterBay's LiveArchive and SharePlex, we can provide an even better solution to our customer and prospects for reporting purposes," said Todd Starnes, Business Alliance Manager of Quest Software. "Furthermore, LiveArchive leverages the SharePlex technology to aid in the archiving process. Through the integration of our products, the customer gains the benefits of data archiving without any business downtime."

About Quest Software

Quest Software Inc is a leading provider of application management solutions. Our products increase the performance and uptime of business-critical applications while driving down the total cost associated with running those applications. By focusing on both the people and technology that make applications run, Quest Software enables IT professionals to achieve more with fewer resources. Quest Software is based in Irvine, California and has offices around the globe. For more information, visit www.quest.com.

About OuterBay Technologies

OuterBay Technologies is a leading provider of software products for mastering applications data growth. Through proactive archiving of production databases, customers improve application performance, minimize downtime for upgrades and maintenance, reduce storage costs, and provide users continuous access to historical data. Founded in 1997 by four database technologists, OuterBay Technologies is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Europe and Australia. Customers include Fortune 1000 and emerging global economy leaders, spanning high technology, manufacturing, financial services, and other industries. For more information, contact OuterBay at www.outerbay.com or 408-557-6100.

Contact Jeanne Achille, The Devon Group, 1129 Broad Street, Shrewsbury, NJ 07702, 732-542-2000 x11, jeanne@devonpr.com.

Telstra Retail Strengthens CRM Backbone

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, announced that it will provide an integrated Teradata warehousing solution to Telstra Retail and Telstra OnAir, divisions of Telstra Corporation Limited, to enable an efficient customer relationship management (CRM) program and cut operating costs. The announcement follows another Teradata agreement with Telstra Wholesale, signed a few weeks ago, and strengthens Teradata's presence in the global telecommunications industry.

The Teradata platform will play a vital role in Telstra Retail's overall strategy to enhance customer relations and provide business intelligence for management and operational decision-making. Specifically, the Teradata warehouse will address the competitive markets for Telstra Retail products and Telestra OnAir.

"We're excited to strengthen our relationship with Telstra and to support them in meeting the challenges of competition in the domestic market. Our relationship with Telstra Retail and Telstra OnAir further enhances our capabilities in the telecommunications sector in Australia and globally," said Julian Beavis, Teradata division vice president.

The project will include the integration and migration of data from Telstra's existing management information systems to the Teradata warehouse and subsequent decommissioning of incumbent systems.

"The telecommunications industry is undergoing massive changes. Customers are now demanding more efficient services and full-featured products. Teradata technology will enable Telstra Retail to deliver the best mix of products and services to its millions of customers," said Beavis.

"Just as we at Teradata develop our technology and business solutions with our customers in mind, Telstra's implementation of an integrated data warehouse reflects the focus and importance of its customer-care strategy that seeks to deliver on clients' demands and requirements. We are pleased to be Telstra's partner in delivering the best customer care," added Beavis.

The new platform will enable a single-perspective, enterprise-wide view of the organization. It will query vast amounts of data quickly and provide information that will help Telstra management make critical business decisions. It is also expected to reduce costs in rolling out information architecture to the growing user base of Telstra Retail and Telstra OnAir.

Telstra Retail, a business division of Telstra Corporation Limited, caters to the telecommunications needs of consumers, including home users, smalloffice -home-office (SOHO) and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

As Telstra Retail anticipates growth among its users in voice, data and Internet services, the Teradata platform will give it the flexibility and scalability to handle large volumes of data and transactions.

Teradata databases and data warehousing solutions are being used by many global telecommunications companies including SBC Communications, Sprint, BellSouth, Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T and France Telecom.

Teradata Australian customers include Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, St. George Bank, Qantas Airways, Village Roadshow, Tattersals and Optus.

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.

Contact Dian Terry, Teradata Division of NCR Corporation, 937-485-2225, or dian.terry@ncr.com.