Bankers Trust Invests In Saros Document Management Solution; Information requests that used to take days can now be fulfilled in less than 10 seconds.

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 14, 1995--Today Saros Corp. announced that Bankers Trust Co., the seventh largest banking company in the United States, has selected Saros Mezzanine 3.5 as its enterprise-wide document management solution.

Mezzanine effectively manages the entire life cycle of Bankers Trust documents and other information objects across the enterprise network. With Mezzanine and Saros Document Manager, Bankers Trust provides its employees an advanced tool for capitalizing on the value of existing documents from anywhere throughout its worldwide organization. This latest IT implementation enhances the reputation of Bankers Trust as a technology leader in the financial services markets.

"We're committed to making Saros our standard in electronic document management," said Kevin Vaughn, vice president of Bankers Trust. "Our goal is to provide every authorized employee reliable access to the company's information assets. Saros has helped us advance a great deal in the way we meet the challenge of getting the most out of our continuing investment in information assets."

The Saros solution will help Bankers Trust strengthen its competitive position by providing employees immediate access to electronic information in any of the 50 offices worldwide. With Mezzanine, end-users can transparently retrieve and exchange the most up-to-the-minute version of important financial documents, no matter when or where a document was created, stored, last modified, or archived. By implementing Mezzanine, Bankers Trust can dramatically reduce document storage and retrieval costs while accelerating information exchange across its enterprise -- a critical competitive advantage in today's global banking market. "In a trader mentality, any information that takes more than a few seconds to retrieve is unavailable information," said Vaughn. "With Saros, the concept of a lost document goes away."

Prior to implementing the Saros solution, Bankers Trust end-users had to grapple with arcane passwords and complex naming conventions that took time to identify and understand. Faced with such obstacles, end-users became conditioned to avoid on-line information requests.

Bankers Trust met those challenges with Saros Mezzanine, enterprise library services software that manages the entire life cycle of Bankers Trust documents, and Saros Document Manager, an integrated document management package designed to capitalize on the robust functionality of Mezzanine. End-users now execute logical document searches that bridge repositories and keep critical information at their fingertips. Employees use keywords, full-indexed attribute data, browsing or content-based searches to access specific documents. Once the file is found, the Saros Document Manager retrieval service automatically launches the appropriate native application.

"We used to have supervisors spend entire eight-hour shifts looking for a document, then pass it on to other supervisors because they hadn't found it," Vaughn explained. "With Saros, that search takes 10 seconds. This will convert the real estate liability of vast stores of tape archives into an accessible intellectual asset."

Bankers Trust was pleased with the Saros solution's ease of implementation and user-friendly interface, which allows employees to become comfortable using the software more quickly than anticipated. By incorporating either Saros Document Manager, or an in-house custom developed front-end using the Mezzanine API, Bankers Trust was able to present all users with a familiar and intuitively functional interface. In some cases the training process took as little as 20 minutes.

"Training for the Saros system was unobtrusive and surprisingly simple," Vaughn said. "It has such a rich list of benefits for the end-user, but one that I really appreciate is how it provided such powerful tools with minimal impact to the work environment."

The company finds particular value in the advanced security provided by Mezzanine, which guarantees complete, customizable access control for each file. This allows a document's author to determine which users can access, view or modify any given document and its versions. This file-level security ensures that neither the original file, nor any of its versions, can be detected or deleted by unauthorized users.

Mezzanine also lets administrators control how a document is filed. For example, Bankers Trust will take advantage of this feature for its Global Investment Bank. When a global trader modifies certain documents, they will be automatically filed in a pre-determined repository providing strategically enhanced storage. By tracking the entire life cycle of each document and related information objects, Mezzanine will provide the company an approved audit trail for reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission and other government regulatory agencies. With these advantages, the Mezzanine solution not only saves end-users time and confusion accounting for documents through lengthy archive searches, it provides the assurance that documents are both safe and up-to-date.

Bankers Trust has found that, in a market in which time is literally money, the Saros document management solution has put the company ahead of its competitors. "Information availability drives competitive edge today," Vaughn said. "Saros greatly improves efficiency at a lower cost. It puts accurate information at our fingertips, and that's what I call competitive edge."

Throughout the sales and implementation process, Saros leveraged the experience gained in providing enterprise solutions to Fortune 500 companies for the specific business necessities associated with supporting an organization the size of Bankers Trust. "Bankers Trust is an excellent example of a large corporation in which rapid, efficient exchange of information is a mission-critical priority," said Mike Kennewick, Saros vice-president of sales and marketing. "From the beginning Saros has been committed to helping global companies like this one realize the commercial benefits of enterprise-wide document management."

About Bankers Trust

Bankers Trust Co. is the principal banking subsidiary of Bankers Trust New York Corp., the seventh largest banking company in the United States, with assets of $107.0 billion. Bankers Trust Co. and its affiliates provide commercial banking, investment banking and trust services to corporations, governments and high net worth individuals through offices in more than 40 countries worldwide. The bank enjoys a reputation as one of the world's most innovative financial institutions. Over the past three years, Fortune magazine's annual Survey of Corporate Reputations ranked Bankers Trust first in innovativeness among all commercial and investment banks.

About Saros Corp.

Since 1989, Saros Mezzanine enterprise library service (ELS) software has served as the foundation for a variety of customized enterprise document management programs. Mezzanine software manages the complete document life cycle and features distributed document search capabilities, multi-level security and access control, version control, back-up mechanisms and archiving. Saros Document Manager is a packaged document management program for Microsoft Windows, based on Saros Mezzanine. Saros Document Manager provides all Mezzanine Enterprise Librarian services plus integration of routine tasks such as printing, faxing, sending electronic mail and more, from a single easy-to-use graphical user interface.

Saros Corp. is the industry's leading enterprise document management company, with more than 350,000 seats sold to commercial and government customers worldwide. Saros products are sold directly to end-user customers through the Saros sales, service and consulting organization. Saros, co-founder of the Document Management Alliance (with IBM, Novell and Xerox), has technology and marketing agreements with a number of major hardware and software vendors, and is the preeminent provider of OEM document management technology. Founded in 1986, the privately-held company is based in Bellevue, Wash.

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1995 Saros Corp. Saros and Mezzanine are registered trademarks and Enterprise Librarian is a trademark of Saros Corp. Microsoft, Microsoft Excel, and Visual Basic are registered trademarks and Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corp. Other brand names are trademarks of their respective holders and used for identification purposes only.

CONTACT: Saros Corp.

Doug Duffield, 206/990-0316 or [e-mail]

or

Waggener Edstrom

Darren Stordahl, 503/245-0905 or [e-mail]

or

Bankers Trust

Kevin Vaughn, 212/250-3264 or [e-mail]