Blaze Software Ships New Blaze Advisor Innovator, Letting Business Managers Adapt Systems to Changing Conditions without Programming.

Business Editors

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 6, 2000

Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite 3 introduces unprecedented rule

performance and functionality

Blaze Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), a leading supplier of "Beyond Personalization(TM)" e-business solutions, today delivered a revolutionary new product, Blaze Advisor Innovator, and shipped release 3 of its Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite. Together, these products give businesspeople complete control over e-business processes associated with customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. Managers and policymakers can add, change, or remove the rules that drive e-business without using programming, development environments, or structured languages of any kind.

Blaze Advisor Innovator gives business managers for the first time the power to create and change the business policies and procedures that drive their e-business applications, using familiar business terms and their favorite Web browsers--with no training whatsoever, and without taking applications down to make changes. Advisor Innovator enables developers to rapidly create point-and-click Web pages for non-technical people who control business processes.

Release 3 of the Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite also introduces a richer development environment, faster performance, lower memory use, and the scalability to drive massive-scale B2B and B2C applications. The Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite, written entirely in the Java programming language, is an integrated family of software products that gives e-business applications adaptable and personalized interactions, consistent across all contact points, which can lead to greater customer retention, decreased costs, and increased sales.

New Blaze Advisor Innovator Enables Managers to Intuitively Change Business Rules Driving E-Business Systems

One of the first adopters of Blaze Advisor Innovator is Salesmation.com, an e-marketing ASP in Southern California. Salesmation has deployed a working model of Advisor Innovator and is integrating business rules throughout its Web-based platform. "Adding Advisor Innovator to the Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite has given Salesmation the opportunity to turn data into revenues faster and easier than ever before," said Thomas Ronk, Salesmation's chief executive officer. "For the first time, we are able to offer managers, marketers, and any person that can navigate a Web site the ability to turn marketing ideas and business policies into a completely automated advertising and sales system with their first use of Salesmation.com."

"Businesses need to stay abreast of internal and external changes in business practices and ensure that decisions and interactions are consistent across the enterprise. They can't wait for their IT departments to keep pace," said Eric Kintzer, vice president and chief technology officer at Blaze Software. "The end user should possess the tools needed to handle these changes in real time. This is the principle behind Blaze Advisor Innovator."

Innovator's Technical Features Allow Easy Integration into Enterprise Systems

The sophisticated technology that powers Blaze Advisor Innovator's new business approach remains hidden to end users. Developers are able to create a framework for secure and verifiable updates to the rules underlying system behavior within authorization and security guidelines chosen by the company (including LDAP-based systems). Rule modification screens may be custom-tailored to company specifications, including specialized terminology, use of graphics, pull-down menus, and other convenience features. Changes completed by authorized personnel may be deployed immediately in online systems or may be collected for testing and deployment at a later time.

Blaze Advisor Innovator provides these capabilities through three product modules:

- Innovator Workbench allows developers to define policy

structures that will be maintained by business managers with

easy-to-use Web applications. With Innovator Workbench,

components of one rule project can be reused in other

projects.

- Innovator Runtime validates and processes business rule

changes.

- Innovator Repository stores rule components, projects, data

entry controls, rule component values, and audit trail data,

tracks policy changes, and manages conflicts between

simultaneous users. Use of the XML standard ensures

compatibility with varied file systems and directory services

in use at customer sites.

Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite 3 Release Provides Increased Speed and Functionality

Blaze Software also announced the shipment of major upgrades to the Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite to support Blaze Advisor Innovator and to provide customers with significant improvements in functionality, speed, ease of use, and efficiency. Now in its third major release, Blaze Advisor is one of the most stable, robust, and well-documented business rule platforms in the industry. The improved Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite 3 includes enhancements to the existing Blaze Advisor product family:

- Blaze Advisor Builder allows users to quickly and easily

capture the rules and expertise that reflect a company's

personality and express its business practices in a visual

development environment for defining, editing, and testing

personalization and business rules. Version 3 provides a

richer development environment, easier navigation, performance

improvements, and new features to work with Blaze Advisor

Innovator.

- BlazeAdvisor Rule Engine powers e-business applications by

intelligently processing the business rules that drive an

interactive experience. When used in conjunction with the

Blaze Advisor Rule Server, Version 3 includes faster load

times and dramatically smaller memory footprints, providing

greater performance and scalability. Version 3 also includes

explicit support for date and time-sensitive rules and support

for the latest Sun Microsystems Java(TM) 2 platform, version

1.3 including Java HotSpot(TM).

- Blaze Advisor Rule Server eliminates nearly all of the

programming and system downtime associated with adapting to

change, while providing fast response and high availability 

for thousands of people across all of a company's e-business

systems. Version 3 includes new mechanisms for servicing

simultaneous users, scheduling deployments, performing dynamic

load balancing, and reducing memory requirements, providing

scalability for massive-scale B2B and B2C applications. For

customers using Enterprise Java Bean deployments, Version 3

includes full Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) support. In

combination with Blaze Advisor Innovator, Version 3 of Blaze

Advisor Rule Server provides a solution for Application

Service Provider (ASP) businesses that need to manage rules

independently for each of their client companies.

Salesmation's Mr. Ronk concludes, "The power, convenience, and flexibility provided by the Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite with Advisor Innovator is unparalleled. It's like cloning your top sales and marketing experts thousands of times and placing them in your Web site to handle each and every visitor based on their unique demographic and behavioral profile."

About Blaze Software

Blaze Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE) is a leading provider of rules-based e-business software enabling adaptable and personalized interaction that is consistent across all contact points. The Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite, written entirely in the Java programming language, is designed to give e-business applications more personalized interaction for users, which can lead to greater customer retention, decreased costs, and increased sales. Blazed applications can be changed on the fly, allowing e-business offerings to respond quickly to changing market conditions, business practices, and customer preferences. Blaze Software's personalization solutions are constructed to be extended easily across contact points (Web, email, call centers) and across processes (customer, employee, partner and supplier).

Blaze Software powers e-business projects for more than 200 customers in the high technology, financial, insurance, manufacturing, telecommunications, and healthcare industries, and Blaze Software products are embedded in leading e-business software packages. Blaze Software offers complete support for implementations across extended enterprises and within software applications, including training, consulting, and integration services. Blaze Software is headquartered in San Jose, California, and maintains a global network of subsidiaries and resellers in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. For more information, visit www.blazesoft.com.

Blaze Software, Blaze Advisor, Blaze Advisor Solutions Suite, and Beyond Personalization are trademarks of Blaze Software, Inc. Other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.