BP Selects Asera Software to Power Commercial Fuel Industry's First Private Trading Exchange; Asera Delivers Reliability, Scalability for BP Direct's Real-Time, Sell-Side Solution.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BELMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2001

Asera, Inc., provider of the leading eBusiness Operating System, announced today that the commercial fuels business unit of BP has selected Asera's software platform and services to support BPDirect.com, the commercial fuel industry's first real-time private trading exchange.

BPDirect, operated by BP's U.S. Commercial Sales unit, provides its customers with 24x7 information access, real-time order and transaction processing, product pricing, access to customized catalogs, and order status and history.

Using Asera's solution, BPDirect's customers can easily order multiple products for multiple locations, view all orders and extract detailed reports, and search a product catalog customized for each customer. The site also allows status checking of both online and offline orders, current pricing, freight, and tax information, as well as access to historical purchasing and volume data.

"With BP Direct, we've become the leader in online branded fuel procurement by providing our customers with convenience, reliability and procurement cost savings," said Paul Dell, director of IT and program manager for BP U.S. Commercial Sales. "We chose Asera because we wanted a scalable platform for growth, while integrating with existing Enterprise Resource Planning systems," Dell said. "BP Direct has delivered transactional efficiency with more than 99 percent reliability. As a result, we've seen an increase in, and a high rate of satisfaction among, our customers."

BPDirect is the latest BP activation using Asera. Last year, BP's Chemicals division selected Asera's Platform to establish its ChemicalsChoice site, which integrates 16 of its chemicals business units.

"We are pleased that BP has again selected the power and flexibility of Asera's open eBusiness Operating System for the integration and automation of its supply chain," said Warren Weiss, president and chief executive officer of Asera. "Asera's Platform offers the scalability and rapid deployment to help innovative companies like BP create real-time information management and delivery of data across the enterprise."

The Asera(TM) eBusiness Operating System(TM) is an open software platform and development environment that makes possible customized business processes, built in part from existing applications but enabling the delivery of new kinds of real-time Web services.

According to an article by Rod Johnson published in The AMR Research Alert on B2B Marketplaces, March 1, 2001, "The fragmentation of internal ERP, CRM and SCM systems across sites, departments and business units, will prevent companies from reaping the benefits of Business Community Integration (BCI) and unified relationships with key customers. Thus is the potential power of Private Trading Exchanges (PTXs), and Asera's eBusiness Operating System more than any other system serving the sell-side, is the purest, most ideal commerce platform model meant for this market."

BP Direct plans to add further customization, additional supply chain and broader access to users of Asera's Platform.

BP Direct was launched last November to a select group of existing customers in the trucking, utility, automotive and OEM, railroad, construction, mining and government industries.

According to Dell, the total volume ordered online is growing rapidly. More than 40 million gallons were purchased during the pilot program and BP Direct.com has delivered more than 70 million gallons of refined products since launching in November 2000.

About BP

BP is one of the world's largest petroleum and petrochemical groups and is the single, global corporate brand formed by the combination of the former British Petroleum, Amoco Corporation, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) and Burmah Castrol. BP is a major producer of oil, natural gas, petrochemical and solar products. There are about 17,150 BP and Amoco branded retail sites in the U.S. and roughly 12,000 additional retail locations worldwide. Sales in 2000 were in excess of $148 billion. The company's main activities are exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas; refining, marketing, supply and transportation; and manufacturing and marketing of petrochemicals. In addition, the company has a growing activity in gas and power and in solar power generation

About Asera, Inc.

Asera provides Global 2000 and emerging-growth companies with an eBusiness Operating System that includes a patent-pending software platform and applications development environment. Asera allows companies to customize best-in-class software applications, implement their business processes rapidly, and remain insulated from the cost and complexity of technology change. Asera's eBusiness Operating System is a critical enabling technology for the emerging Real-time Enterprise. Based in Silicon Valley, Asera also has offices in the UK and Germany. Asera can be found on the Web at http://www.asera.com.

Note to Editors: Asera and Asera eBusiness Operating System are trademarks of Asera, Inc. All other products and names may be trademarks of their respective companies.