Acta Releases First eCommerce Data Platform to Accelerate B2B Application Response Times.

Business Editors/High-tech Writers

Nine Enterprises Around the Globe Purchase Acta's Platform

in First 60 Days Following Beta Announcement

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2000

On the first day of general availability, Acta Technology announced that it has already signed up nine customers for the Acta eCommerce Data Platform.

The platform -- the first designed to make critical back-office data rapidly available for business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce -- has attracted large enterprises in the U.S., South America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and East Asia.

The customers for Acta's new offering are: Albemarle Corporation (U.S.--NYSE: ALB), General Electric Power Controls (U.K.), Holdercim (Brazil), Hunter-Douglas (Netherlands--Amsterdam exchange: HUDN), Masterguard (Germany), Maxtor Corporation (U.S.--NASD: MXTR), Spah (Germany), TriGem (Korea), and The Westlake Group (U.S.).

With general availability, Acta is set to meet the demands for a B2B data infrastructure, said Acta president and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin.

"We are filling an important need that enterprises everywhere are just beginning to come to grips with as they execute their B2B strategy," said Mills Baldwin. "The novelty of B2B has worn off, and the realities are now setting in. Enterprises need a highly scalable platform that can quickly deliver complex information needed for B2B decision-making."

Back-office cannot meet demands for B2B data

The problem that many companies are facing, said Mills Baldwin, is that back-office systems are not designed to accommodate frequent online requests for "heavy data" -- information on order history, order status, inventory status, and more.

"Back-office systems, by and large, do what they were meant to do extremely well, but they were not meant to handle frequent requests for the heavy real-time and historical data that businesses need to complete B2B transactions and intelligently manage their performance in B2B environments."

The Acta platform helps protect the back office from numerous queries. It consists of eCaches(TM), a suite of packaged data caches that speed the delivery of back-office data in specific subject areas of eCommerce and business intelligence, and ActaWorksRealTime(TM), an award-winning data movement-and-management server. With today's announcement, the following products are now generally available: ActaWorksRealTime, Customer Billing eCache, Customer Order eCache, and Vendor Inventory eCache.

As a pioneer in the extraction and movement of enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, Acta has helped over 130 companies to liberate their back-office data to compete in the most competitive business markets.

"Acta's leadership in ERP data solutions was a key factor in our decision to purchase their B2B data platform," said Bob Cook, Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Administration for Hunter Douglas, the leading international manufacturer of window fashions. "Only Acta provides the expertise in ERP and the technology for delivering the data in the manner demanded by B2B environments -- rapidly, scalably, and around the clock."

About Acta Technology, Inc.

The Acta eCommerce Data Platform is the first and only solution designed to make enterprise data B2B eCommerce-ready across all channels in the networked economy. With Acta's highly scalable data platform, enterprises can maintain a real-time, online dialogue with customers and partners -- providing them the critical information they need for transactions and business analysis.

Acta partners with leading vendors offering enterprise resource planning (ERP), front-end eCommerce, and eAnalytic solutions. The company's 140+ customers include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Chevron, Shell, Monsanto, and other leaders in the Global 1000. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Acta has international offices in London, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, the Netherlands, and Zurich.

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.