Basis Technology Hires Former CIA Linguistic Technology Expert Joel Ross to Establish Washington D.c. Office.

Business/Technology Editors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 20, 2002

Company to Offer Software for Processing Foreign Languages to

Defense and Intelligence Communities

Basis Technology, the leading provider of software globalization solutions, today announced it has hired former CIA officer Joel Ross as Vice President, Defense and Intelligence Services. Ross will establish the company's office in Washington, D.C., and will focus on fulfilling the foreign language processing needs of the U.S. Government.

Prior to joining Basis Technology, Ross spent 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a variety of roles, most recently as the CIA's Foreign Language Technology Officer. In this role he identified, evaluated and disseminated technologies to enable the CIA to process information from disparate sources and in many languages. Ross also served on the Foreign Language Committee, a group that works on foreign language issues across the Intelligence Community as a whole. He currently maintains a Top Secret U.S. Government Security Clearance.

"When I retired from the CIA, I had the opportunity to join a number of technology companies," said Ross. "I chose Basis Technology for two reasons. First, I was extremely impressed with the quality of their linguistic technology capabilities and the breadth of languages they cover. Second, as a result of my work with the CIA and the Foreign Language Committee, I am well aware of the critical need within the intelligence and defense communities to more effectively process vast amounts of incoming data in a variety of narrowly spoken foreign languages. I'm looking forward to offering Basis Technology's solutions to this market in order to meet this important national objective."

Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology, said, "It is a tremendous honor to have Joel represent our company to the U.S. Government. Going forward, we will continue to focus much of our product development effort on meeting the needs of the intelligence and defense communities. Our products are currently being used to process data in Middle Eastern, Asian and European languages. Our products are also being used in applications relevant to national defense, such as deep Web search, email mining, normalization, transliteration, and others."

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology is the leading provider of products and services for multilingual information processing. The company specializes in high-performance, highly-reliable software components and rapid deployment engineering services covering all aspects of globalization.

Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and e-mail categorization. Clients include industry leaders Amazon.com, America Online, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Inktomi, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Terra Lycos.

Company headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with branch offices in San Francisco, California; Washington, D.C.; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 617-386-2000.