BroadQuest Announces The First Customer Information Portal Application; Front-Office Application Delivers Self-Service Access to Customer Information.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 8, 1999--BroadQuest, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise portal applications, today announced general availability and new customer implementations of BroadQuest 2.0, a browser-based enterprise application that gives employees, partners and customers self-service access to live customer information.

This single point of access is called a Customer Information Portal. The Customer Information Portal gives users quick and easy access to information, allowing them to set up real-time alerts and personalized reports to capture information from front-office and back-office applications including solutions from Aurum (Nasdaq:AURM -- news), Baan (Nasdaq:BAANF -- news), Clarify

(Nasdaq:CLFY -- news), IBM (NYSE:IBM news), Lotus, Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT -- news), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL news), Remedy (Nasdaq:RMDY -- news), SAP (NYSE:SAP -- news), Siebel Systems  (Nasdaq:SEBL -- news) and Vantive (Nasdaq:VNTV -- news).

BroadQuest's innovative broker-based architecture gives thousands of users access to millions of live records with minimal impact on the source application systems. BroadQuest guarantees efficient and cost-effective deployment through its Rapid Success Package that gets the application up and running in about a month.

Early customers, including Forte Software, Novell, and Wells Fargo Bank, are using BroadQuest's Customer Information Portal to accelerate their response time when serving customers and partners. This not only increases customer satisfaction levels, but also increases the return on investment in front-office and back-office applications.

"The market opportunity for enterprise information portals, and packaged portal applications in particular, is tremendous," said Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz Group.

"Having invested heavily in ERP and CRM solutions, companies are now looking for ways to leverage those investments by making the information stored in those applications available to a much wider constituency of users across departmental lines. We are going to see a very high growth rate as this market matures."

Single Point of Access to Customer Information

BroadQuest is designed for front-office employees who need access to online customer information in order to do their jobs better and raise customer service and satisfaction levels. BroadQuest solves the day-to-day information needs of sales, support, marketing, and service teams by giving them access to customer information located anywhere across the enterprise.

"Using BroadQuest 2.0, business managers might just be able to cut across organizational boundaries, leverage the content of individual enterprise applications, and create a comprehensive view of their customer relationships," said Geoffrey Bock, senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group.

Kathleen Pacyna, manager of customer management solutions at BroadQuest partner Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW -- news), said, "BroadQuest's Customer Information Portal is a breakthrough in front-office applications that delivers scalability and performance benefits by optimizing Sun's Java and Solaris software technology, and Sun Enterprise(TM) servers. Together, Sun and BroadQuest enable companies to more effectively manage their most valuable assets-their customers."

Self-Service Interface and Broker-Based Architecture

Key features of BroadQuest 2.0, the Customer Information Portal, include a self-service browser-based interface and an innovative broker-based architecture. An intuitive, browser-based interface is a requirement for delivering the self-service information access needed in the front-office. On the back-end, a broker-based architecture gives access to vast amounts of data without impacting the performance of source applications.

"Given our multiple enterprise sources of both live and historical data, and our plans to scale our Customer Information Portal to support several thousand users, BroadQuest's broker-based architecture is the best approach to meeting our complex requirements," said Ed Harrington, IS director of customer services information management & reporting at Compaq.

"BroadQuest's Customer Information Portal provides employees, partners and customers with a single point of access to live customer events," said David Thomas, CEO of BroadQuest. "A Customer Information Portal accelerates business response time, which leads directly to improved corporate productivity and higher levels of customer service and satisfaction."

BroadQuest is the first packaged portal application on the market, and gives companies a way to increase the return on their investments in front-office and back-office applications by making the data contained in those systems available to users in many more departments. The fast and easy access to live customer data across the enterprise, not just within a specific department, improves customer responsiveness, raises customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increases sales and employee productivity.

"The vast majority of a company's computer-proficient workforce does not have ready access to the critical information they need to effectively do their jobs," said Dave Cutler, director of customer services at Novell. "BroadQuest's Customer Information Portal leverages the intranet, to give enterprise access to a greater number of employees. Simpler and broader access to enterprise applications will increase our company's responsiveness in situations where up-to-the-minute answers from across the enterprise are critical to problem resolution."

Judy Hodges, research manager at International Data Corporation, said, "Enterprise portals hold the promise of single-source access to a wide array of enterprise information, but the market is fragmented, with different vendors approaching the problem in different ways. A packaged application portal approach, such as BroadQuest's, has the distinct advantage of rapid deployment at a reasonable cost. This is a very attractive proposition to organizations looking to take advantage of the emerging enterprise portal market."

Michael S. Jarrett, partner in charge of Arthur Andersen Business Consulting's Advanced Technology practice for the Western region, said, "Arthur Andersen's participation in the implementations of the BroadQuest customer information portal is testimony to our firm-wide commitment to providing clients with leading-edge solutions to improve business performance.

"BroadQuest is unique in that we can provide our clients with a working enterprise portal application in about a month, and with its broker-based architecture, it appears that BroadQuest can give thousands of users access to multiple enterprise data sources -- without impacting the performance of the underlying production systems. This is a significant achievement in software engineering."

Pricing and Availability

BroadQuest 2.0 is available through the company's Rapid Success Package, and guarantees installation on one data source in about a month for under $100,000. BroadQuest 2.0 is currently available direct from BroadQuest and through reseller channels.

About BroadQuest, Inc.

BroadQuest is the leading provider of enterprise portal applications that help corporations use the Internet to become more responsive to employees, partners and customers. BroadQuest sells direct to Global 2000 companies who have invested in front-office and back-office applications like Aurum, Baan, Clarify, IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, Remedy, SAP, Siebel Systems and Vantive.

Announced customers include Forte Software, Novell and Wells Fargo Bank. BroadQuest 2.0 is a browser-based enterprise application that gives employees, partners, and customers self-service access to live enterprise-wide customer information.

BroadQuest has strategic partnerships with enterprise application software companies such as Siebel Systems and Vantive. BroadQuest has service partnerships with leading systems integrators, including Arthur Andersen LLP (KnowledgeSpace.com) and Cambridge Technology Partners (Nasdaq:CAPT -- news).

BroadQuest was founded in 1996 and is based in San Jose, California. Additional information about BroadQuest, Inc. is available on the Internet at http://www.broadquest.com or by calling 888/287-5665.