Acta Technology Announces 50th Customer for its Award-Winning Data Warehousing Solution for Use With SAP R/3.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 1, 1999--

New Acta customers include Bell Canada, Chevron,

Farmland, Monsanto, PG&E and Shell Chemical;

Acta also announces European sales to FX Meiller,

Guinness and Sanofi Winthrop

Acta Technology, Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, announced today it has secured the 50th customer of its award-winning data warehouse solution, ActaWorks, which is explicitly designed and developed to be tightly integrated with SAP(tm) R/3(tm) and other ERP applications.

Acta customers span the globe. Acta's installed base now includes customers in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and Australia. Blue chip customers in North America who recently purchased ActaWorks, Acta's SAP R/3-to-data warehouse extraction, transformation and loading tool, include Acuson, Bell Canada, Callaway Golf, Chevron, Citizen's Communications, Farmland, IDT, Monsanto, PG&E and Shell Chemical. In the fourth quarter 1998, Acta closed significant European deals with Guinness and Sanofi Winthrop in the UK and FX Meiller in Germany. Many of these customers, including Chevron, Guinness, PG&E, Callaway, and Chevron, have purchased one or more of Acta's RapidMarts, pre-packaged data warehouses built with ActaWorks.

Since Acta introduced ActaWorks in March, 1998, the company has also made sales to Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; Janssen-Ortho, a division of Johnson & Johnson and Maxtor.

During 1998, Acta entered into a number of key partnerships with vendors that are helping further extend the market reach of ActaWorks. Acta is a Complementary Software Partner in SAP's Complementary Software Program (CSP) and a partner in PeopleSoft's Global Alliance Program, recently receiving PeopleSoft certification. Acta has established strategic alliances with leading BI/OLAP vendors including Brio, Business Objects, Cognos, CorVu, Hummingbird, Hyperion, Information Advantage, Infospace, Microstrategy and Seagate Software.

"Acta was one of the first vendors to recognize that most ERPs lack decision support capabilities," said Philip Russom, Director of the Business Intelligence Service at Hurwitz Group. "SAP users need to consolidate data from R/3 and other sources into data warehouses to enable data analysis for competitive advantage. ActaWorks clearly delivers business value to SAP installations by helping them populate and deploy data warehouses very quickly," Russom said. "ActaWorks has been very successful as one of the first products in the very lucrative market of data warehouse solutions for ERPs."

"Reaching this 50th customer milestone so quickly exceeded even our most bullish sales forecasts," said Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "We are very pleased that ActaWorks -- in less than one year -- is the clear market leader for SAP R/3 extraction, transformation, and loading solutions for data warehousing. With our recent certification by PeopleSoft, we look forward to ramping up sales even more quickly into the ERP marketplace where companies are seeking to build decision support solutions that take advantage of the wealth of information contained in their ERP systems."

ActaWorks

ActaWorks is the first extraction, transformation and loading tool designed specifically to address the challenges of building data warehouses from packaged applications. Using an intuitive graphical user interface, ActaWorks extracts data from SAP R/3 and other sources, transforms and cleanses the data, and loads it into a data warehouse or data mart for strategic business analysis. Unlike other extraction tools, which attempt to extract data directly from the application's underlying database, ActaWorks extracts data and essential business information via the ERP software application layer, the only way to ensure access to all data and business logic.

Data mappings, transformations, and control logic to manage a complex, multi-step data warehouse process are specified using a graphical user interface without writing any code, and are stored in a metadata repository. ActaWorks extracts the requested data from SAP R/3 by generating optimized ABAP/4 code and from non-SAP R/3 relational sources by generating SQL. Joining of SAP R/3 and non-SAP R/3 data and other data transformations are performed in-memory in a high performance engine. ActaWorks is the foundation on which Acta's RapidMarts, packaged data warehouses for use with SAP R/3, are based.

About Acta Technology

Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client/server applications. Initially focused on SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) and PeopleSoft (Nasdaq:PSFT), Acta's solutions include pre-packaged data marts built around the industry's only extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaWorks, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with ERP systems.

Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. Acta has sales offices throughout the US and in the United Kingdom, Germany and France. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com.

Acta, ActaWorks and RapidMart are trademarks of Acta Technology, Inc. SAP, R/3 and all SAP product and service names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.