Acta Technology Opens Office in the United Kingdom; Former ETI and BMC Software Sales Executive to Head Acta's UK Operations.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 1998--Acta Technology Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, announced today it has established operations in the United Kingdom.

In addition, the company announced that its UK operations -- located in Camberley, Surrey, England -- will be headed by Dave Berry, an industry veteran with nearly 20 years of IT sales management, sales and technical pre-sales experience.

Acta Technology UK Ltd. will provide sales, marketing, technical support, training and consulting services to the United Kingdom marketplace for its data warehousing solutions for use with SAP(TM) R/3(TM) and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Acta's products include ActaWorks, the first data warehouse solution explicitly designed and developed to be tightly integrated with SAP R/3 and other packaged applications, as well as RapidMarts, packaged data warehouses for the rapid deployment of business analysis.

Acta was founded in 1996 in the United States, and has seen rapid acceptance of its ActaWorks solution, which is being used at prestigious firms such as Monsanto Company, Shell Chemical, S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH, and Maxtor Corporation.

"Organizations are finding that managers throughout their companies are demanding complementary decision support systems (DSS) that provide reporting and analysis capabilities on the day they deploy ERP systems," said Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "ERP systems -- such as SAP R/3 -- contain enormous amounts of detailed transactional data that corporations want to analyze for business intelligence. We look forward to helping our UK customers rapidly deploy comprehensive data warehousing and DSS solutions, benefiting the broad user-base of SAP R/3 and other ERP systems."

Added Wolfgang Martin, Vice President Europe of Application Development Services at the META Group, "In North America, Acta has successfully focused on delivering business value to SAP R/3 installations by helping them deploy data warehouses very quickly. The European market is now seeking solutions for SAP-based data warehouses, so the timing is right for Acta's entrance into the UK marketplace."

Berry, who will serve as Acta's UK Country Manager, joined Acta from Evolutionary Technologies International Inc. (ETI), where he was the company's top salesman worldwide before becoming the UK sales manager. During his stint as sales manager, Berry was responsible for growing the UK office from five to 23 employees and turning the UK region into ETI's top performing region worldwide. Prior to ETI, Berry spent four years with BMC Software where he was a highly successful sales account manager.

ActaWorks

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. Data mappings and transformations are specified using a graphical user interface without the need to write any code. Information describing the SAP R/3 and other data sources, the target data warehouse schema, and the data mappings and transformation rules are stored in an open relational metadata repository. To extract data from SAP, ActaWorks automatically generates optimized ABAP, SAP's 4GL, obviating the need to develop and maintain customized 4GL code (ABAP) to manage the data warehouse process.

RapidMarts

Acta's RapidMarts for use with SAP R/3 provide an "out-of-the-box" warehouse solution that includes a target schema and source-to-target mappings and transformations that handle change data capture, hierarchy extraction, error recovery and other complex data warehouse processes. Each Acta RapidMart has pre-defined data extraction jobs that automatically populate the data warehouse with a company's SAP R/3 data and can be implemented in days. Close integration with third-party BI/OLAP tools means very rapid deployment of business analysis for customers who run their business with SAP R/3 and other ERP applications.

About Acta Technology

Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first and only vendor focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client-server applications. Initially focused on SAP, 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 SAP R/3 and other ERP software's application layer. Acta is an Independent Software vendor (ISV) participating in the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and has signed a strategic OEM relationship with Cognos.

Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The company was founded by Sachin Chawla and Alex Gorelik, the architect and manager of Sybase Inc.'s highly successful data movement software, Sybase Replication Server. Acta customers include Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; Janssen-Ortho, and Monsanto. 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.