[0] Eventory and Industrial Network Announce Partnership.

Business/Technology Editors

REPEATING...

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 2000

Eventory, Inc., (http://www.eventory.com), a leading provider of e-commerce solutions to industrial distributors, announced today a partnership with Industrial Network, (http://www.industrialnetwork.com), a business group representing 41 industrial distributor locations across the U.S. with aggregate sales in excess of $500 million.

The partnership demonstrates Eventory's ability to appeal to large networks of distributors in the $200 billion industrial maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) supplies industry.

Eventory provides full-featured e-commerce capabilities at an affordable price to industrial distributors. As an application service provider (ASP), Eventory can spread the enormous cost of building and operating an e-commerce infrastructure across all of its members, while still allowing such members to maintain their individual brand identities.

Member distributors, as they do in the brick-and-mortar world, can conduct business with customers through a branded and customized web store where they control what is sold, to whom and under what conditions. Eventory's unique value proposition allows independent distributors that make up 90% of the industrial MRO market to effectively compete with the largest war chests in the industry.

Michael Baygood, president of Industrial Network said, "Eventory is, hands-down, the best partner for our membership today. Their business model and management demonstrates that they understand the needs of our members. They simply help them to become e-commerce enabled as quickly, easily and cost-effectively as possible. The newness of the e-commerce world has created a lot of confusion about how industrial distributors can best take advantage of Internet technologies. Having evaluated many other options and approaches, there is no doubt that Eventory has the right solution for Industrial Network."

"This is an exciting development for Eventory," said Jon Cohen, Eventory's CEO and co-founder. "Passing Industrial Network's stringent evaluation process further validates our value proposition to industrial distributors. Working with Industrial Network offers Eventory the opportunity to leverage the powerful e-commerce infrastructure we've developed to benefit groups of distributors that wish to work together in bringing e-commerce capabilities to their customers."

Eventory, Inc. is a privately held, business-to business (B2B) e-commerce provider. The company develops and provides e-commerce applications services for the industrial supplies industry. Eventory's solution enables industrial distributors to conduct their business through an integrated e-commerce network that maintains the distributor's unique identity while leveraging the resources of the entire network. In the U.S. alone, an estimated $200 billion in annual sales are transacted through tens of thousands of independent distributors, mostly privately held. For further information, visit the company's web site, http://www.eventory.com.

Industrial Network, Inc. is a business group focused on the industrial marketplace of distributors, manufacturers and industrial end users. The group represents over 41 industrial distributor locations across the U.S. and over $500 million in aggregate sales. The group's objective is to enhance the strengths of local market knowledge and flexibility by combining members' collective resources of inventory, technical capabilities and business practice with nationwide market coverage. For further information, visit the group's website, http://www.industrialnetwork.com/.