BetaSphere Builds Momentum in Customer-Centric Product Development and Signs Over 10 New Deals.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 5, 2001

DIRECTV, United Parcel Service and Lexmark International

Select BetaSphere to Validate Customer Requirements

During New Product Introduction

BetaSphere, a leading provider of software and services that enable customer-centric product development, today announced it has recently added DIRECTV, United Parcel Service (UPS), Lexmark International, Outbounder, Netreon, and Uprizer to its rapidly growing customer base. BetaSphere, which was named a Top Ten CPC Vendor by Aberdeen Group, has also deepened its relationships with Intel Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, FedEx Corporation, VoiceStream Wireless, and Sierra Wireless, all of which have been using BetaSphere's Feedback Management Server and services to validate customer requirements and product stability during New Product Introduction.

"Our commitment to helping companies double the effectiveness of their development resources by providing a collaborative, Web-based application for collecting, managing and acting on customer feedback throughout the product lifecycle, has resulted in deepened relationships with HP, FedEx and Intel, among many others," said Phil Davis, VP of Strategic Direction and Marketing at BetaSphere. "BetaSphere's proven track-record and documented ROI with these market-leading companies reaffirms the necessity of our solutions to enable customer-centric product development and enables us to attract other industry leaders such as UPS, Lexmark and DIRECTV."

"BetaSphere's solutions provided Uprizer with technology and best practices that enable us to produce a better peer-to-peer networking product and validate the needs of customers by testing products in a real world environment," said Dave Scantling, CEO of Uprizer. "By ensuring that features consistently meet customer priorities and requirements, we're able to bring higher quality products to market which drive increased revenue and greater levels of customer satisfaction critical to our success."

Uprizer is among the first companies to implement BetaSphere's recently released Feedback Management Server(TM) (FMS) Version 3.0. The next generation in BetaSphere's customer feedback application, FMS 3.0 provides powerful workflow automation, flexible triggers for acting on customer feedback, and offers a variety of options to analyze and report results.

The latest additions to BetaSphere's growing customer base of more than 100 leading companies reinforce the findings of a recent report completed by Accenture, which quantifies the business value impacts of companies that incorporate customer feedback into the development process. Companies participating in the study realized time-savings of up to 40 percent for engineers, 50 percent for product managers, and up to 80 percent for project coordinators using BetaSphere's solutions. By validating customer needs and market readiness during product development, these companies also reported significant reductions in post-launch support costs -- realizing cost savings up to $500,000 in bug fixes and recall avoidance, and up to $600,000 in potential customer support costs savings.

About BetaSphere

BetaSphere is the leading provider of software and services that enable customer-centric product development. BetaSphere's Feedback Management Server(TM)(FMS) application integrates customer feedback into the development process, enabling companies to increase market acceptance and lower technical risk when developing and introducing new products. Over 100 market leading companies including Federal Express, Cisco, Intel, HP, Motorola, Palm, Sun Microsystems, UPS, and Xerox use BetaSphere solutions to develop the right products -- faster, better, and with fewer resources. BetaSphere was named a Top Ten CPC Vendor by Aberdeen Group in its recent report, Making a Case For Collaborative Product Commerce as The Next Big Thing. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., BetaSphere is a privately held company backed by JP Morgan Partners and GE Equity. For more information, visit www.betasphere.com.

Note to Editors: BetaSphere is a registered trademark and the Feedback Management Server is a trademark of BetaSphere, Inc. Other products or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.