Andromedia Announces Further Strategic Collaboration With BroadVision to Provide E-commerce Customers With Superior Product Recommendations.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 15, 1999--

Andromedia's Likeminds(TM) Personalization Server 3.0 in Concert

With Broadvision One-to-One Commerce Improves Browser-to-Buyer

Conversion and Increases Repeat Purchase Rates

Andromedia, Inc., a leading supplier of e-marketing software for e-commerce, today announced the furthering of its strategic alliance with BroadVision, Inc, the leading provider of one-to-one e-business applications for relationship management for the extended enterprise.

Joint Andromedia and BroadVision customers will utilize Andromedia's collaborative filtering technology, LikeMinds(TM). Personalization Server 3.0, also announced today, in concert with BroadVision's matching agent and rules-based personalization. The two technologies will flexibly and powerfully deliver highly accurate product recommendations and improve customer conversion and loyalty.

LikeMinds Personalization Server 3.0 leverages every type of customer data (online, offline, realtime, historical, navigational, transactional, explicit and implicit) to make highly accurate collaborative filtering-based product recommendations and deliver personally relevant content and targeted promotions.

Andromedia and BroadVision collaborated earlier this year to develop innovative monitoring technology that determines how customers are actually interacting with an e-commerce application.

The integration of Andromedia's ARIA(R) eCommerce Web site activity analysis solution with BroadVision One-To-One Commerce yields the highest-value data analysis and reporting, the most comprehensive view of customer shopping behavior, and the most complete picture of the site.

Complementary Personalization Solutions Benefit the Customer

Customers of both Andromedia and BroadVision will benefit from the most comprehensive shopping-activity reporting and personalization solution available -- the combination of LikeMinds Personalization Server 3.0, ARIA eCommerce, and the twenty different types of personalization that ship out of the box with BroadVision One-To-One Commerce's patented matching agent and rules-based technologies.

BroadVision's personalization solution is complemented by LikeMinds patented and highly accurate collaborative filtering technology.

Andromedia's LikeMinds patented collaborative filtering software seamlessly extends BroadVision's patented personalization rules and matching agent technology. LikeMinds software tracks individual visitor behavior, finds others who behave similarly, and uses the behavior of those most like the targeted individual to predict future behavior.

BroadVision's rules-based personalization allows merchants to dynamically match appropriate content to users based on observed, stated and transactional information. Combining LikeMinds and BroadVision enables marketers to maximize the value of personalization with site-specific business logic.

There are twenty different types of personalization that ship with a BroadVision application. Rules-based personalization is one effective technique for personalizing content when the end goal can be accurately identified and the products or content can be well characterized. For example, it makes sense to promote additional camera memory to the purchaser of a digital camera.

LikeMinds collaborative filtering approach is effective when the application calls for individualized and highly accurate predictions where individual tastes and preferences play a large role in determining an individual's response to the recommendation and the desired result isn't known.

With the example of the digital camera, adding LikeMinds collaborative filtering to the mix could reveal that the purchasers of digital cameras also tend to buy more disk storage, something that might not be coded in the rules. As a result, the combination of rules-based and collaborative filtering technology provides the most comprehensive and accurate recommendations possible.

"This important next step in the BroadVision/Andromedia collaboration further extends our proven relationship," notes Eric Golin, chief technology officer and vice president of product management for BroadVision.

"Retention is obviously a way to increase valuable customer share. However, retention of savvy online customers is a challenge for most e-commerce sites. With the competition just a click away, it is crucial to provide our customers with the most comprehensive competitive advantage possible."

"With the integration of BroadVision's rules-based personalization and Andromedia's LikeMinds collaborative filtering technology, we can continue to raise the bar on personalization implementation methods to deliver key advantages to our customers."

"LikeMinds Personalization Server 3.0 accurately anticipates what individuals are likely to purchase, even before they realize what they want themselves, by leveraging the community knowledge, tastes and preferences of shoppers on the site," says Steve Kanzler, vice president of marketing for Andromedia.

"By applying this powerful predictive element in conjunction with BroadVision's site-specific merchandising rules, we are delivering what the online marketer wants -- a solution that drives revenue higher by providing the customer with the most personally relevant experience possible."

LikeMinds Personalization Server 3.0 -- The Highest-Performance

Personalization Solution

LikeMinds Personalization Server 3.0 is the highest-performance and most scalable personalization solution available. Its patented, non-locking, parallel-processing architecture can easily support sites with millions of users and millions of products.

LikeMinds' flexible and powerful architecture allows it to use multiple data sources -- online/offline, implicit/explicit, realtime/historical, transactional/navigational -- making it adaptable to fit online marketers' needs in a variety of industries, including entertainment, fashion, retail, and wholesale office supplies.

Patented and Accurate

Andromedia developers invented collaborative filtering in 1987. The patented collaborative filtering algorithms at the core of LikeMinds Personalization Server have been refined in commercial applications for the past 12 years.

LikeMinds uniquely builds individualized affinity groups in realtime for every customer, using up-to-the minute information to deliver recommendations from people most similar to the target individual. Additionally, LikeMinds Personalization Server employs sophisticated techniques, such as prediction weighting, to boost recommendation accuracy.

LikeMinds Personalization Server even takes into account differences in how strongly individuals react to particular products or promotions to improve accuracy and adjust the strength and confidence of every recommendation.

Andromedia Smart eMarketing

Andromedia is the Smart eMarketing company. Smart eMarketing results from leveraging every step in the e-marketing value chain -- building user profiles, identifying patterns and relationships, determining the appropriate response, responding in realtime, and measuring results in order to refine the process.

Andromedia's ARIA Web analysis software and LikeMinds personalization software enable customers to create a better online experience and increase sales. ARIA captures, records and analyzes high-value data in realtime and reports on customer behavior that is meaningful to an online business.

LikeMinds Personalization Server engages customers with highly accurate product recommendations and personally relevant content that helps them decide what to try and what to buy. Andromedia is the only vendor that offers an integrated solution that combines application-level behavior tracking, realtime personalization, and the ability to report on the effectiveness of personalized promotions.

About BroadVision

BroadVision, Inc. (Nasdaq:BVSN) is the leading worldwide supplier of e-business applications for relationship management across the extended enterprise. BroadVision's end-to-end solutions enable companies to rapidly deploy and cost-effectively operate secure, scalable, intelligent, and flexible e-business applications for e-commerce, financial services and knowledge management.

The company's entire product line has experienced exceptional growth and increasing acceptance by Global 2000 businesses as well as pure-play e-startups.

BroadVision has more than 300 customers in the financial services, retail, distribution, high technology, telecommunications, and travel industries, including American Airlines, Credit Suisse, Cyberian Outpost, Development Bank of Singapore, Ernst & Young, Fingerhut, Hewlett-Packard Company, Intuit, Liberty Financial, Motorola, Nortel Networks, RS Components, Toyota UK, USAA, Vodafone, and Xerox.

BroadVision is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., and maintains an extensive network of subsidiaries and licensed resellers in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. The company can be reached at 650/261-5100 or at http://www.broadvision.com.

About Andromedia

Founded in 1996, San Francisco-based Andromedia (www.andromedia.com) is a leading supplier of e-marketing software for e-commerce. Andromedia has more than 120 customers, including many of the largest sites on the Web.

Major customers include Audi; Boston Herald; CheckOut.com; Cinemax; Columbia House; Cyberian Outpost (Nasdaq:COOL); E-TRADE (Nasdaq NM:EGRP); Intuit (Nasdaq:INTU); Levi Strauss & Co; Office Depot Online (NYSE:ODP); Sony (NYSE:SNE); Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW); the U.S. Postal Service; The Weather Channel; and West Coast Entertainment Corporation (OTCBB:WCEC). Financial backers include Ares Management L.P.; Big Flower Holdings (NYSE:BGF); ABS Employee Ventures (affiliated with BT Alex. Brown); C.E. Unterberg, Towbin; Draper International; JK&B Capital; Platinum Ventures; Sippl Macdonald Ventures; SOFTBANK Holdings; Travelers Insurance; UBS Capital; and Westbury Capital Partners. Strategic partners include Allaire (Nasdaq:ALLR), Art Technology Group, BroadVision (Nasdaq:BVSN), Computer Associates, EarthLink Network (Nasdaq:ELNK), Engage Technology, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP), NetGravity (Nasdaq:NETG), Netscape (Nasdaq:NSCP), Sun Microsystems, and Vignette (Nasdaq:VIGN).

Andromedia and LikeMinds are trademarks and ARIA is a registered trademark of Andromedia, Inc.