On The Market:

FTI Consulting Introduces New Electronic Evidence Practice

FTI Consulting Inc, a premier national provider of strategic and litigation-related consulting services, has launched a new Electronic Evidence and Discovery Practice that will help lawyers efficiently preserve and analyze large amounts of electronic data.

The new practice group is based in the firm's Houston office and is headed up by H. Kirke Snyder, a highly regarded expert in the field and professor of law and ethics. Snyder holds a law degree, a masters degree in legal administration, and has more than a dozen years experience as a consultant at both Deloitte & Touche and Arthur Andersen.

"Including email, more than half of all business documents are in electronic format and never printed," said Snyder. "This fact has changed the face of litigation discovery and places a significant burden on lawyers to preserve electronic documents even before commencement of litigation."

According to Snyder, the new practice will offer services that fall into three primary categories:

• Evidence Preservation -- FTI will make a forensic copy of computer hard drives, create an "authentication/chain of custody report," and store the electronic evidence in a secure facility;
• E-Data Attorney Review -- FTI will create an electronic report listing all electronic files retrieved from the hard drives, including deleted files, emails, word processing documents and spreadsheets. Attorneys can view the file detail in a simple directory format from a CD-ROM or online repository and click on a specific file name to view the actual document; and
• Forensic Analysis -- FTI experts will use special data mining software to open password-protected or encrypted files, search for "smoking gun" documents and analyze transactions for possible fraudulent transactions. "Our team is composed of world-class experts who understand legal requirements, document management, forensic accounting and data mining," said Snyder. "Together, we offer the deepest end-to-end electronic evidence practice within the legal vertical market."

FTI Consulting is a multi-disciplined consulting firm with leading practices in the areas of bankruptcy and financial restructuring, litigation consulting and engineering/scientific investigation. Modern corporations, as well as those who advise and invest in them, face growing challenges on every front. From a proliferation of "bet-the-company" litigation to increasingly complicated relationships with lenders and investors in an ever-changing global economy, U.S. companies are turning more and more to outside experts and consultants to meet these complex issues. FTI is dedicated to helping corporations, their advisors, lawyers, lenders and investors meet these challenges by providing a broad array of the highest quality professional practices from a single source. For more information, please go to www.fticonsulting.com.

illumitek/Mantas to Provide Visual Fraud Safeguards

illumitek Inc, an award-winning provider of integrated visualization and analysis software technologies for data exploration and knowledge discovery, announces a partnership with Mantas (Fairfax, Virginia) a leading provider of behavior detection technology for the financial services industry, to provide visual fraud and compliance safeguards for that industry.

Mantas will incorporate illumitek's nViZn Development Platform into its Behavior Detection Platform for use in its anti-money laundering, fraud detection, best execution, and broker and investor protection applications.

nViZn builds and deploys Web-based visual intelligence applications, providing all the components necessary to tie data, statistical analysis, and data visualization into graphically rich, interactive applications. Customers using nViZn save time and development costs while freeing up developer resources for other tasks.

Developed together with banking and brokerage experts, the Mantas product proactively collects and analyzes transaction data, then highlights and disseminates relevant, actionable information. Using sophisticated data mining technology that tracks every transaction in the enterprise, Mantas can uncover vital intelligence about unsuitable customer behavior, fraudulent broker selling practices, and suspicious employee trading activity.

"Financial services organizations amass huge amounts of data," said Tony Crescenzo, CEO of illumitek. "To make sense of their information today, a graphical representation of the trends and relationships between different data sets is required. nViZn makes that happen, helping to answer the questions, What does it mean and what will likely happen next?, with an interactive visual interface."

Few financial companies are able to address the immediate strategic and technical challenges around money laundering, fraud, best execution, compliance and surveillance. Technological solutions that incorporate analysis, visualization and forecasting are becoming increasingly more important to safeguard financial institutions against suspicious activities.

"Financial services firms must be able to solidify their integrity, protect themselves from potentially high-risk situations, and fulfill their firm's fiduciary responsibility to their customers," said John Young, Chief Technology Officer for Mantas. "The ability to detect key behaviors from their data using our robust behavior detection capabilities combined with information visualization is crucial for our customers. We chose the nViZn Development Platform because it is simply the best option available for building visual intelligence and mining applications, meeting our customers needs now and in the future."

About illumitek

illumitek Inc is an award-winning provider of integrated analysis and visualization software technologies for data exploration and knowledge discovery. The company's nViZn Development Platform is a component-based framework, that simplifies and accelerates the prototyping, development and deployment of information intelligence applications. Customers use nViZn as the backbone of their custom intelligence products, bringing advanced analysis, patent-pending visualization, and Web-based interactivity and deployment to their applications. Customers include National Cancer Institute, Viaken Systems, Hewlett-Packard, SPSS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Research International and others. illumitek was formed into a separate company from SPSS Inc in October 2000, and is based in Herndon, Virginia. For more information please visit www.illumitek.com.

About Mantas

Mantas delivers business intelligence, compliance solutions and behavior recognition for the financial services industry. Backed by a powerful combination of sophisticated technology and industry expertise, Mantas boasts some of the most effective tools that banks and brokerages need to combat money laundering, fraud and suspicious trading activity. The unparalleled level of insight delivered by Mantas products enables firms to reduce risk, improve internal efficiencies, and satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements. Mantas solutions currently monitor more than 300 million accounts and transactions daily. The company empowers some of the world's largest financial institutions, including Citigroup, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), Merrill Lynch, and other leading banks and brokerages. Mantas is a Safeguard Scientifics partner company and is backed by SRA International, Inc, an information technology firm with decades of experience. For more information, please visit www.mantas.com.

MIS AG North America Launches MIS Plain Excel Integration

MIS AG North America, a leading provider of business intelligence solutions, announced the launch of MIS Plain. MIS Plain is the new generation of its Excel Integration software that delivers planning, reporting and ad hoc analysis and features a user-friendly Excel front end. MIS Plain's features include advanced analytic capabilities and a direct integration with leading data warehouse platforms such as Microsoft Analysis Services and SAP BW.

MIS Plain fully leverages the functionality of Microsoft's advanced MDX statements to solve complex analytic questions with unprecedented flexibility. As a result, business users can now create dynamic Excel reports, which automatically adapt to changes -- such as new cost centers -- in source systems. MIS Plain gives end users easy access to ranking, exception reporting, color keying and other methods for ad hoc analysis through BI-XML, an MDX-based technology developed by MIS AG.

On the back end, MIS Plain now offers a seamless integration to Microsoft Analysis Services via an ODBO (OLE DB for OLAP) interface. The integration of other ODBO-compatible data sources is currently in development.

"MIS has a long history of leveraging the power of the Microsoft platform," said Anthony Politano, CEO of MIS AG North America. "With MIS Plain's full integration with Excel and Microsoft Analytic Services, we have further expanded our integration. This now opens a path for new as well as existing DecisionWare users to take advantage of the advanced OLAP capabilities in the Microsoft/MIS solution."

MIS Plain is an integrated part of MIS DecisionWare, MIS AG North America's software platform for planning, reporting and analysis. MIS DecisionWare was named a platinum member of the Microsoft Data Warehousing Alliance (DWA) in the category for analytic applications in November 2001.

MIS Plain is available now. For pricing information, please contact MIS AG North America by calling 973-679-0724 or visiting www.misdecisionware.info.

About MIS AG North America

MIS AG North America is a leading provider of business intelligence solutions. Through the MIS DecisionWare suite of products, companies are able to utilize their business data to move from reacting to what is happening in their business to understanding why.

CableEdge Manages Broadband Cable Networks/IP Services

Stargus Inc, unveiled CableEdge, the first intelligent network management and planning software designed exclusively for DOCSIS infrastructure and IP services. The CableEdge family of products includes the patent-pending CableEdge data collection and analysis technology platform and additional service-specific applications that expand its analytical and reporting capabilities.

The CableEdge platform and initial application, Optimizer, will be generally available in the second quarter of 2002 and are already in live network trials with two major cable operators.

Until now, the HFC network management needs of cable operators have been served by simple network tools that only provide a snapshot of activity for a limited number of subscribers or network devices. Through its innovative technology, Stargus is taking network management a generational leap beyond the basic reactive reporting of network problems into an entirely new category of software -- intelligent network management and planning -- designed specifically for cable by leveraging the full power of DOCSIS.

CableEdge utilizes a distributed architecture with unprecedented scalability to help monitor the health and performance of cable networks with millions of cable modems, cable modem termination systems and other DOCSIS compliant devices. Using this wealth of network traffic and performance data, CableEdge analyzes the data and derives benchmarks for network service quality. Based on how the network is performing compared to the benchmarks, CableEdge makes expert recommendations so cable operators can proactively address network issues before they impact customers. This information can also be used to add capacity to the existing network, and to plan for cost-effective network upgrades, expansions or new service roll-outs.

"Cable operators are focused on success-based spending that optimizes existing network capacity, improves customer service operations, and supports the rapid and successful roll-out of new IP services," said Russell H. Stephens, president and CEO of Stargus. "CableEdge is the only product that collects the network and device data specified by DOCSIS to finally enable cable operators to 'see' their network and support the full lifecycle of cable services, from initial planning to deployment and cost-effective on-going support."

Giving MSOs the Information Advantage CableEdge provides real-time monitoring and management of DOCSIS devices and services, bringing an unparalleled degree of visibility and control to broadband cable networks. With CableEdge's comprehensive view of faults, congestion, security, availability and overall performance -- cable operators have all the information they need to quickly and proactively address or prevent slowdowns and outages, identify upgrade or reconfiguration requirements, as well as discover opportunities for expansion or additional service revenue. This network intelligence results in several key benefits:

• Increased Reliability Reduces Operating Costs -- actively preventing congestion, outages, and other network problems decreases the number and length of trouble calls and non-revenue generating truck rolls.
• Additional Capacity and Capital Efficiency -- trials show Stargus' expert system recommendations for CMTS settings increase capacity (up to 400%). These recommendations can help to defer purchasing CMTSs, adding channels or splitting nodes, and advise operators on when and how to invest in new capacity.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction -- fewer network outages, proactive problem resolution, reduced MTTR and better overall service quality reduce customer churn.
• Confidently Deploy Advanced IP Services - historical performance and capacity information enables product management to plan, model and roll-out new offerings such as tiered services, third-party ISP management, VoIP, and business services, ensuring successful deployments. And even with its network-wide scale and real-time data collection, CableEdge has been designed, and proven in tests, to create a negligible amount of network overhead.

New de facto Standard for Customer Experience

As part of CableEdge, Stargus has created the first benchmarks that correlate directly to end users' service quality to provide consistent, multi-vendor measurements to evaluate the performance and availability of any cable network. Degraded Modem Hours (DMH) serves as a 'network warning' and specifies when network issues are negatively impacting QoS-sensitive applications such as VoIP or streaming video. Severely Degraded Modem Hours (SDMH) is a 'network alert' and specifies when network issues are causing all applications to be negatively impacted, including e-mail and the Web. These benchmarks, calculated based on CableEdge's real-time visibility into numerous traffic and connectivity factors that impact overall network health, enable operators to improve customer satisfaction by proactively making recommendations to avoid congestion and outages.

Service-Specific Applications

Stargus has created CableEdge to be a flexible and expandable information source with the addition of various service-specific applications that analyze, interpret, report and make recommendations on the data collected by the CableEdge platform. The first, Optimizer, targets immediate needs of cable operators, while future applications will address issues such as improving customer support, driving revenue growth with advanced IP services and third party ISP management.

Optimizer is designed to maximize the capacity, reliability and performance of existing cable networks. Optimizer works with the CableEdge platform to continuously monitor all the DOCSIS compliant devices in the network to identify, isolate and correlate any faults, congestion, and problems network-wide and then proactively notify operators through its flexible alerting capabilities. Its expert system then provides intelligent operating recommendations to resolve the issues, ranging from changing the interface settings on a particular CMTS to identifying specific HFC components that are not operating properly. Optimizer also stores, analyzes and interprets network performance data over user-specified periods of time and creates valuable reports for trend analysis that can reveal portions of the network that should be targeted for upgrades or expansion, as well as other business planning information.

"Although cable operators have spent billions building out high-capacity, two-way networks, the majority of that investment has been in the hardware to deliver best-effort Internet services," said Amy Harris, Broadband Technologies Analyst IDC. "As cable operators expand their service portfolio with tiered pricing and QoS-dependent offers such as VoIP, they will need a complete and detailed view of network performance to avoid congestion and ensure service quality to succeed in the market."

Multi-Department Views and Usage

Unlike traditional network management tools, CableEdge has been designed as a management solution for a broad range of departments within a cable operator, including the data center and NOC, network engineering, plant operations, product management and customer service. Using its Web-based interface, users in these departments can access the real-time and historical network information to provide a solid foundation of data and expert recommendations for making critical business decisions.

Distributed, Standards-Based Architecture

The distributed architecture of the CableEdge platform features two main components, the StarNode and the StarController. A StarNode is the local data collection, initial analysis and aggregation point in a given cable network, typically residing close to the edge of the DOCSIS infrastructure. Each StarNode can support up to 30,000 cable modems. StarNodes send information to the StarController, the centralized point for data warehousing, service-specific application analysis and reporting.

Both the StarNode and StarController run on off-the-shelf, small footprint servers that are common throughout HFC network and field operations. Users access the system via a Web-based interface to the StarController. A CableEdge administration client is also included that provides access to both the StarNodes and StarController for configuration and administration purposes.

To leverage the investment cable operators have already made in backoffice systems, CableEdge works with standards-based interfaces to share data with existing network management, CRM, trouble ticketing and other OSS systems.

About Stargus Inc

Founded in June 2000 by several of the key architects of the DOCSIS standards, Stargus is focused on helping cable operators improve their capital efficiency, reduce operating costs, drive revenue growth and improve customer satisfaction with its CableEdge family of software products. CableEdge is the first intelligent network management and planning software designed exclusively for DOCSIS infrastructure and advanced IP services. The company is headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts. For more information, visit Stargus online at www.stargus.com.

Contact Stargus Inc, Doug Broad, 978-749-0007 x223, dbroad@stargus.com.