Black Pearl Unveils a New Version of Flagship Product, Knowledge Broker; Knowledge Broker 2.0 Significantly Advances Enterprise Automation of Critical Processes and Decisions.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 29, 2002

Black Pearl, Inc., a leading provider of event-driven business automation software solutions for Financial Services, Banking and Insurance enterprises, today announced the general availability of Knowledge Broker 2.0. This flexible solution provides the platform for customers to develop, maintain, optimize and execute their critical decision-making processes.

"Knowledge Broker 2.0 focuses on combining business intelligence techniques with real-time data integration to enhance an enterprise's agility, responsiveness and ultimately, their competitiveness," said David Ludvigson, Black Pearl's President and CEO. "I'm pleased to say that Knowledge Broker 2.0 marks a significant advancement toward our goal of being the leading technology vendor for automating critical, real-time processes and decisions in the enterprise. Knowledge Broker is becoming the business process engine that enterprises use to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations and processes."

Stephen D. Hendrick, Group Vice-President for IDC comments, "Black Pearl's Knowledge Broker is a remarkable product that offers levels of functionality and completeness that are unmatched in the industry. The product enables users to gather meaningful information and events from internal or external sources and use that data to invoke business processes."

Knowledge Broker's centralized view of information facilitates the sharing of facts and ideas, which leads to more intelligent approaches to solving problems and making decisions. For example, actionable recommendations are made with a unified view of a particular customer, ensuring consistent customer treatment across various organizations within an enterprise. This translates into customer satisfaction and loyalty, which helps to drive revenue and increase long-term profitability.

"The 2.0 release marks a significant level of maturation for Knowledge Broker," said CTO and co-founder, Lisa Hammitt. "It includes many new features, such as an application/agent editor that helps business users build applications without having to know Java code. The natural language capabilities are also enhanced to ensure ease of use for the business user." Other features in the 2.0 release include enhanced predictive modeling techniques and simplified heterogeneous data joining within the data integration layer.

Knowledge Broker 2.0 offers many customer benefits. The ability to integrate multiple enterprise data sources, including real-time data from beyond the firewall is a great advantage. This XML-based approach to data integration allows business analysts to easily collect and analyze data, reducing the time and expense of traditional data collection. Knowledge Broker 2.0 also allows for faster application deployment and reduced development time and expense with its method of reflecting an enterprise's business model in flexible, reusable business concepts. These business concepts are coupled with a logical business rule and process flow approach -- the basis for automating business processes and decisions within an enterprise.

Knowledge Broker takes advantage of an all XML and Java based architecture to transform the knowledge encapsulated in clients' data and business practices into real-time, tailored, decision-making processes. Knowledge Broker reduces the complexity and ambiguity in decision-making by refining data, abstracting information and business events into real-time context, and conforming decision criteria with enterprise practice standards and policies. This approach fosters efficiency, organizational flexibility, and faster time-to-market of products and services.

Black Pearl provides solution architecture, implementation, and integration services as well as several fast-start applications of Knowledge Broker.

About Black Pearl

Black Pearl provides event-driven software solutions for Financial Services, Banking and Insurance enterprises looking to increase productivity and automate their complex decision-making processes. Companies use our flagship product, Knowledge Broker(TM), as a business process engine to deploy applications which automate and guide critical, event-based processes and decisions. By using Black Pearl's flexible, cost-effective solutions, decision makers can capitalize on existing technology investments and meet strategic business objectives.

Black Pearl was founded in 1998 and is located in San Francisco. Investors include Advanced Technology Ventures, Reuters, Information Technology Ventures, the Intel 64 Fund, PaineWebber, and Dain Rauscher Wessels. For more information, contact Black Pearl at www.blackpearl.com or [e-mail].