Financial Watch:

SAP Portals/Compaq to Deliver Enterprise Portal Solution

SAP Portals Inc, a leading provider of open-enterprise portal and business intelligence solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP AG, and Compaq Computer Corp, a global enterprise and technology solutions company, announced a strategic alliance to jointly go to market with SAP Portals solutions and Compaq technology. The two companies have joined forces to deliver a fully integrated end-to-end portals solution, offering customers faster deployment, reduced implementation expenses and increased productivity.

Under the terms of the alliance, Compaq will establish global solution centers to support joint strategic business development and sales activities. These solution centers will feature demonstration systems of SAP Portals solutions that will run across Compaq hardware platforms engineered to offer high availability and scalability combined with a full set of infrastructure services, enabling customers to expand without down time. The first joint solution center will be established in Walldorf, Germany.

"A key tenet of our partner program is to seek out the top leaders in their respective markets to best provide customer value and market innovation," said Shai Agassi, chief executive officer of SAP Portals. "The combination of SAP Portals' enterprise portal and business intelligence solutions with Compaq's transactional and operational data performance leadership helps our customers derive real value and significant returns on the enterprise portal solutions they deploy."

The agreement with SAP Portals extends Compaq's long-standing relationship as an SAP platform partner and one of the leading SAP server and storage vendors, with over 15,000 installations. As an active participant in the SAP Portals First Partner Ship (FPS) program, Compaq has maintained a strong and successful alliance with SAP and is a leading supplier of technology for deployment of mySAP.com applications.

"The joint global strategy of SAP Portals and Compaq combines Compaq's excellence in technological innovation and the e-business expertise of SAP to deliver the enterprise portal solution vital to an enterprise business," said Mike Mulcahy, vice president of global alliances and partnerships at Compaq. "The ability to provide a fully integrated platform that runs SAP Portals solutions will allow customers to achieve significant returns on investment without compromising the availability or scalability of their enterprise portal system."

About Compaq

Founded in 1982, Compaq Computer Corp ("Compaq") is a leading global provider of enterprise technology and solutions. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures and markets hardware, software, solutions and services, including industry-leading enterprise storage and computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, communication products, and desktop and portable personal computers that are sold in more than 200 countries. Information on Compaq and its products and services is available at www.compaq.com.

About SAP Portals

SAP Portals is a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP AG with headquarters in Silicon Valley, Calif. The company employs more than 900 professionals worldwide, with approximately 6 million users and more than 2,000 customers.

SAP Portals empowers collaboration and intelligent action by unifying applications, information and services to achieve higher levels of efficiency, enhance the quality of relationships and maximize value across the business. The SAP Portals portfolio includes enterprise portals, business intelligence, premium content offerings and professional services. SAP Portals provides value-driven solutions that significantly impact companies' total cost of ownership, achieving a return on investment beyond other software providers.

For more information about SAP Portals, visit us on the Web at www.sapportals.com or call 800-360-3328.

SAS Turns to Inxight to Go Multilingual

As reported by InternetNews.com Staff, Inxight Software Inc, a Santa Clara, Calif-based developer of software for organizing, analyzing and delivering information in multiple languages, recently announced a worldwide strategic text mining alliance with SAS Institute, a privately held business intelligence concern.

Under the terms of the agreement, Inxight's technology will augment SAS Text Miner software, which enables customers to analyze the vast amounts of textual data that reside in databases, emails and on the Web. Inxight-adapted Text Miner will be available mid-2002.

To develop enhanced textual analysis functionality and to accelerate the time to market, SAS will enhance Text Miner with Inxight's LinguistX Platform, a natural language text analysis solution that analyzes words, phrases and sentences; and Inxight Thing Finder, a software product that identifies and extracts key content from documents such as company names, products, people, addresses and dates.

The agreement with Inxight includes the support of English, French and German, with other language support available separately from Inxight.

"Unstructured textual data, such as emails, research papers and news articles, makes up approximately 85 percent of a company's information. However, most of this data is not available for search, retrieval or analysis. Inxight's proven expertise in linguistic technology coupled with SAS's 25 years of experience in developing analytic solutions will give customers the ability to access and utilize the important textual information that was not readily available to them before, improving employee productivity and delivering high ROI," said John C. Laing, Inxight's president and CEO.

Sybase Inks DW Deal in China with Nanjing Local Tax Bureau

Sybase Inc, a leading e-Business infrastructure provider, announced that its worldwide technology and professional services capabilities enabled it to win the contract for the Information Center of the Nanjing Local Tax Bureau for the Nanjing Local Tax Warehousing project in China. The project is aimed at solving the problems of inquiry, reporting and analysis through the effective integration of the Nanjing Local Tax Bureau's legacy operation system into a new data warehousing system. By delivering sophisticated ways of establishing an end-to-end data warehouse system to Nanjing Local Tax Bureau, Sybase technology will help enable a solid foundation for the optimization and future development of the bureau's data warehouse. The signing of this contract demonstrates Sybase's increased commitment to information systems management solutions for the tax industry in China.

Sybase Technology and Professional Services Team for a Winning Solution

"Sybase's leading data warehouse technology and powerful servers have provided core support for our data warehousing project," said Mr. Chen Qi, director of the Information Center of Nanjing Local Tax Bureau. "We've also been deeply impressed by the Sybase Professional Services team's understanding of our particular administrative challenges during the design and implementation phase of the project."

The objective of the Nanjing Local Tax Database project is to transfer the applications of legacy operation system queues, reporting and analysis to the newly established data warehouse system. The new data warehouse system will help facilitate the integration of the Nanjing Local Tax Bureau's internal data and become the bureau's database center by centralizing data from different bureau locations and data platforms.

With its advanced development tools and outstanding data warehousing products, Sybase has successfully constructed an optimal all-in-one tax management solution, leveraging the applications of local tax information systems across China. During the design and implementation phases, Sybase succeeded in solving the problem of data deficiency and irregularities caused by historical business changes within the Bureau, to make legacy data complete and consistent. Sybase also established a unified front-end application gateway to provide personalized models for users, allowing users to adopt new models for inquiry, reporting, analysis and customized operation.

Components of Industry Warehouse Studio and Adaptive Server IQ Multiplex, Sybase's data warehousing infrastructure products, have served as the backbone of the Nanjing Local Tax Database project. Sybase data warehousing infrastructure products are the ideal solution for organizations seeking to integrate and analyze customer data that has traditionally been stored in multiple operational systems and on diverse platforms across the enterprise. Industry Warehouse Studio and IQ Multiplex, along with Sybase's partner products, include data warehouse design, models, meta data management, conversion, database and visualization components that allow organizations to look at their customers in new ways, converting untapped information in legacy operational databases into business intelligence for increased revenues and profits.

About Sybase Inc

Sybase provides enterprise-class software solutions that fuel e-Business and enable access to information anytime, anyplace. With its industry-leading Enterprise Portal (EP), mobile and wireless, and vertical market solutions, Sybase is one of the largest global independent software companies in the world. For more information, visit the Sybase Website: www.sybase.com.

About Sybase Software (China) Company Limited

Sybase Inc entered the Chinese market in December 1991 and established the Sybase Software (China) Company Limited in 1993. Sybase China employs more than 200 people and currently has a broad customer base of more than 1,000 enterprises encompassing financial institutions, telecommunications, railways, electricity, water supply, environmental protection, petroleum chemical, military and export trading. Sybase China is one of Sybase's fastest growing overseas offices. In order to provide the first-class technical support and services to Chinese customers, Sybase China has opened branch offices in Shanghai, Chengdu, Nanjing and Guangzhou, with a comprehensive network of partners throughout China. For more information, visit the Sybase Software (China) Website at www.sybase.com.cn.

Contact Lisa Dreyer of Sybase Inc, 303-413-4254, lisa.dreyer@sybase.com.