Beefing Up Profits: CROSSMARK Subsidiary Selects Bowstreet Business Web Factory as Key Technology for Consumer Packaged Goods Industry Exchange.

Business/Technology Editors

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 5, 2000

Food giant spin-off Concite will use Bowstreet to optimize promotion

dollars and coordinate sales initiatives

Concite Inc., a subsidiary of the Dallas-based food broker CROSSMARK, has selected the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Factory as the "glue" to bond consumer packaged goods manufacturers, brokers and retailers together via the web and eliminate inefficiencies in their combined sales and marketing efforts.

Using the Bowstreet solution, Concite and its Consumer Packaged Goods Integration Exchange Portal (www.concite.com) will dramatically minimize wasted effort and maximize collaboration as industry players move groceries, health-care products and more from the ground to the consumer's shopping carriage. "Manufacturers and retailers are not reaping the full benefit from the cumulative effects of the $264 billion they spend every year on promotion," said Concite President Rob Bresnahan. "Bowstreet will help us bring them together on the web to align promotional spending, product selection, and sales planning with target lifestyle consumers. And Bowstreet's expertise with Extensible Markup Language (XML), combined with its parametric modeling and NeoCore's hyper-fast XML data search and processing capabilities, will allow us to conform to any system these companies have. No one wants to spend time or money programming or re-engineering their business processes every time the business conditions change."

Bowstreet (www.bowstreet.com), a leading provider of XML infrastructure for business-to-business (B2B) web marketplaces, and its Bowstreet Business Web Factory will let Concite instantly create, customize and manage multicompany "business webs" of interconnected, cross-boundary business services. Concite will use the product to connect manufacturers', brokers' and retailers' back-end systems through Concite's CPG Integration Exchange Portal (IEP). These connections will introduce coordination into their sales planning processes without costly infrastructure changes.

Bresnahan and John Thompson, President of Crossmark Performance Group, jointly conceived the portal to pick up where traditional enterprise applications leave off. Internally focused applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems fail to simplify the myriad business processes a company conducts outside its boundaries. The Consumer Packaged Goods Integration Exchange Portal will solve the problem. A grocery retailer, for instance, will be able to go on the portal to instantly manage manufacturer promotions, analyze results of previous promotions, and develop a nationwide sales plan by category, department and division. Manufacturers will use the portal to promote their brands and special offers to retailers, providing detailed business cases based on demographics, lifestyle analysis and past product performance across trade channels. The portal itself, which goes live in August, will also serve as the platform for Markatec, which will utilize the intertwined business web infrastructure to facilitate co-marketing promotions between manufacturers and retailers.

"Concite is packing efficiency into an enormous industry with historically razor-thin profit margins," said Bowstreet President and CEO Bob Crowley. "Bowstreet is a cornerstone of that efficiency, providing a flexible way to instantly link businesses to their customers, partners and suppliers, and delivering a unique set of business processes to each without expensive and time-consuming programming."

Concite chooses Bowstreet for scalability and flexibility

"Nobody has the technology Bowstreet has," Bresnahan said. "We recognized early on that 60,000 to 70,000 users will crash a traditional system architecture. These users require the scalability and flexibility that the Bowstreet Business Web Factory provides, and we require its unsurpassed mass customization capabilities: With Bowstreet you can take a workflow process and allow an infinite number of ways to use that process by role."

"If you think about it, there are few businesses today that can really predict the arrangement of their business processes or partners in five years," Bresnahan continued. "Concite's Bowstreet-based IEP doesn't make any assumptions about future capabilities; instead it allows participants to react rapidly to changing conditions. Those companies that are perceived as industry leaders are usually those that are simply the most responsive to changing market conditions. Gone are the days where solutions to process issues were disregarded `because the system can't do that.' Using Bowstreet, Concite's IEP gives the power to its subscribers to explore all solutions without system constraints."

Bowstreet will enable companies to come together on the Concite IEP by publishing and exchanging "web services," complete business processes wrapped in XML, the Internet's lingua franca for integration. Bowstreet uses XML, directories and patent-pending automation technology to let companies' line-of-business managers establish and customize these relationships online.

Concite and its partners will publish their web services on the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Exchange, an Internet community where companies can publish, search for, find, exchange and consume other companies' web services to form business webs. The Exchange goes live in Q2 2000.

Concite is also pioneering the use of technology from NeoCore, a Bowstreet partner whose patented digital pattern processing (DPP) technology makes possible heavy-weight XML processing up to 1,000,000 times faster than alternative processing engines. Bowstreet and NeoCore are collaborating on the NeoCore XML Indexed Data Server, which enables exchanges' supporting inventory descriptions in multiple and varying XML formats across all XML schemas.

About Concite

Concite is a vertical B2B Integration Exchange Portal serving the needs of the Consumer Packaged Goods industry. The purpose of the portal is to encapsulate individual manufacturers and retailers in a way that facilitates communication, coordination and collaboration in the sales planning process. Concite is the platform where promotional sales arrangements are constructed and will allow the $265 billion in annual promotional expenditures to reach the consumer more effectively. Concite will establish a closed-loop system that will align sales planning with execution and performance review. In doing so, Concite will house a decision support system that allows manufacturers and retailers to attract target segments from wider geographic proximities, increasing revenues and profit margins. For more information, please visit www.concite.com

About Bowstreet

Bowstreet provides the XML infrastructure designed to transform the World Wide Web from a collection of static web sites into a fluid web of interconnected businesses called "business webs." These dynamic and highly customized B2B marketplaces enable companies to sell new products and services, create new channels of distribution and develop new business models at a fraction of the time and cost of today's approaches. Bowstreet's patent-pending product, the Bowstreet Business Web Factory, and a robust Internet community, the Bowstreet Business Web Exchange, are designed to enable companies to form instant B2B connections, create richer offerings for existing customers and enable line-of-business managers to take complete control of e-business without technical help. For more information, visit www.bowstreet.com or call 603-559-1900.

Bowstreet is a trademark of Bowstreet.com Inc. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.