Acta Completes Next Generation Data Integration Platform; New Release of ActaWorks Leads the ETL Industry in Performance, Function, and Interfaces.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 2001

Acta Technology, the creator of the first data integration platform to combine real-time and batch data movement, today announced the general availability of release 5.1 of ActaWorks. With this release, Global 2000 companies can design, deploy and deliver data warehousing and integration projects from any enterprise data source -- such as PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Siebel Systems, Oracle Applications, mainframe and OS/400 sources, and the leading RDBMS -- faster and at lower cost for Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and eCommerce. Version 5 of ActaWorks now provides the industry's widest selection of prepackaged adapters and native interfaces, eliminating the need to code in even the most complex data integration projects.

"By 2004 most enterprises will need to manage 30 times the volume of data they managed in 1999," said Ted Friedman, senior analyst, Gartner, Inc. "As companies increasingly require integration of supply, demand, customer and market data to ensure timely and accurate delivery of products and services, they are integrating higher volumes of complex data. As a result, ETL vendors will need to improve upon their tools' throughput and ability to deal with complex integration scenarios."

ActaWorks now 2.5 times faster than Informatica's PowerCenter

The latest release of ActaWorks includes architecture changes that have resulted in doubling the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) performance of ActaWorks 5.0. In testing verified by a third party auditor, ActaWorks performed 2.5 times faster than Informatica's (U.S.-NASDAQ: INFA) PowerCenter in data ETL, moving 2.1 MB of data per second per CPU in a typical data warehousing environment (See Acta Leads ETL Industry in Performance press release). This improved performance is due to the Acta Performance Optimizer, which provides:

-- Automatic workload distribution, a rules-based engine that puts the ETL work
where it is most efficient -- at the source, target, or in the ActaWorks engine


-- Intelligent threading, which automatically assigns more CPU resource to the
more complex data flows

-- Support for parallel processing and database partitioning that take
advantage of all available computing resources

Visioneer saves $4 million using ActaWorks

"In just six weeks Stonebridge Solutions, our systems integrator, implemented a very complex supply chain optimization project using ActaWorks that integrated large amounts of data from dozens of sources," said Murray Dennis, CEO and president of Visioneer, Inc., a world-class developer of intelligent imaging solutions. "Other alternatives we looked at quoted 9 to 12 month implementation times. By deploying ActaWorks, we saved 8 to 10 months in implementation time, and saved $3 million in a single quarter by avoiding a price reduction through the knowledge we gained of product sell through. We also saved another $1 million by having up-to-date rebate information. With ActaWorks, we achieved a 10x return on investment in the first year alone."

Higher productivity, reduced maintenance costs

ActaWorks is the fastest to deploy ETL product with a code-free, graphical designer interface for all tasks involved in designing, debugging, testing, modifying, and maintaining data integration projects, for both batch and real-time. ActaWorks' new data scan feature lets a developer preview what's happening to the data at each step of the transformation, for faster development and debugging.

Ongoing integration projects will be both easier to maintain and less costly with the latest release. A new Web-based administration interface allows an IT staff to monitor all ActaWorks servers and jobs from a central location. A rich library of metadata reports (impact analysis, where-used, etc.) makes the maintenance and enhancement tasks easier.

Unrivaled breadth of interfaces

ActaWorks now provides out-of-the-box capabilities to browse metadata for more enterprise applications than any other ETL tool, including PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware and OneWorld, SAP R/3, and Siebel. The new release adds prepackaged adapters to J2EE, JCA, JMS, XMI, and HTTP, eliminating the need for creating these interfaces in complex data integration projects.

Acta is the first ETL vendor to support the new XMI 1.1 (XML Metadata Interchange) standard that provides metadata exchange with over sixteen data modeling tools, ten object modeling tools, and metadata standards and environments from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAS and others. ActaWorks' metadata architecture now supports the OMG Common Warehouse Metamodel for interchange with CWM compliant systems, such as leading business intelligence tools.

Customer Acceptance

"The latest release of version 5 marks an important milestone for Acta and the data integration market," said Carol Mills Baldwin, Acta CEO and president. "It completely fulfills the vision of the version 5 data integration platform to deliver the best ETL solution for large enterprises by delivering breakthrough performance unrivaled in the industry today, coupled with the broadest selection of interfaces available. Our beta customers have given this release enthusiastic support because it reflects Acta's mission of providing unmatched productivity tools."

Over seventeen customers and systems integrators have exhaustively beta tested ActaWorks 5.1, including Albemarle Corp. (U.S.-NYSE: ALB), Centocor (a wholly owned subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson), Maxtor Corp. (U.S.-NASD: MXTR), and Visioneer (a wholly owned subsidiary of Primax Electronics LTD).

Pricing and Availability

ActaWorks 5.1 is available today, starting at $50,000.

About Acta Technology, Inc.

Acta provides the industry's first and only batch and real-time data integration platform expanding extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) technology beyond its traditional data warehousing role to more effectively integrate Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and eCommerce solutions. With Acta's highly scalable data integration software, enterprises can rapidly design and deploy data flows that provide customers, employees, suppliers, and partners with the critical information they need, faster and at lower cost.

Acta's more than 230 customers include Alcatel, Chevron, CommerzBank, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Monsanto, Shell, Unilever, and other leaders in the Global 2000. The company partners with leading systems integrators and enterprise software vendors including IBM, Accenture, Business Objects, Manugistics, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel Systems. Established in 1996, Acta has corporate headquarters in Mountain View, and international headquarters in London, Frankfurt, and Paris.

Note to Editors: eCaches and ActaWorks are trademarks of Acta Technology, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.