Collective Technologies Identifies the Missing Piece of eBusiness Services; Leading Companies, Representing Billions in Revenue, Confirm Need for Outsourced Operations Management.

Business/Technology Editor

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 2000

Collective Technologies, a leading provider of eBusiness infrastructure services, today announced its strategy to fill a critical gap in eBusiness services by developing specific practices in four key areas of operations and management. This market assessment was validated by a select group of Collective's customers representing a wide cross-section of industries ranging from newly founded dot-coms, such as Living.com, to traditional companies, including Morgan Stanley, Standard & Poors and Scudder Kemper Investments, at the first annual Collective Advisory Partners (CAP) meeting last week. The Advisory Partners met to evaluate the state of Collective Technologies' current service offerings and its future vision for supporting core eBusiness functionalities in today's highly competitive, fast-paced marketplace.

"It's clear that a traditional systems management approach falls short today. High turnover rates and a severe shortage of the well-trained IT workers needed to maintain increasingly complex systems leave companies lacking the resources they need to support core business operations," said Ed Taylor, CEO of Collective Technologies. "We not only strive to fill that gap, but also to work with our customers as a virtual extension of their companies to really learn their business and build the foundation for successful eBusiness strategies, now and in the future. We're in a unique position - we have the talent, the technology and, most importantly, strong support from our customers."

The discussion at the two-day retreat at the Barton Creek resort in Austin, attended by industry watchers and top executives from leading companies, validated Collective Technologies' vision and served as a framework for the ongoing development of its new practices. These practices, which focus on business-critical services, such as backup and recovery, database administration, security, availability and networking, address concerns some of the Advisory Partners expressed about the difficulty in recruiting and hiring the qualified consultants needed to support an increasingly large and complex array of systems.

"Because the e-services market is focused primarily on front-end Web integration services, the areas of operations and e-support represent a real concern for growing eBusinesses," said Bill Martorelli, vice president of e-services and Sourcing Strategies at The Hurwitz Group, Inc. "Among the companies that are emerging to address this need is Collective Technologies, providing a highly unique approach to strategic systems management services on an outsourced basis."

About Collective Technologies

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Collective Technologies, Inc., is a premier provider of eBusiness infrastructure consulting services. Through its service offerings, Collective ensures the performance of the systems, networks and databases that are the foundation of eBusiness success. Founded in 1994, Collective Technologies has established a reputation for solid profitability, superior technical expertise and customer-focused, 24/7 support services that optimize clients' operations and IT resources.

The company's clients include such established and new economy leaders as Morgan Stanley, Sun, IBM, Digex, Akamai, Amazon.com, Red Hat, American Express, Discovery.com, Motorola, Disney, Hughes Space and Communications and Lucent Technologies. Collective Technologies has 20 regional offices throughout the United States and can be found on the Web at colltech.com.