Companies Need Answers and Intelligence from Data -- nQuire Answers.

Business Editors and High-Tech Writers

SAN MATEO, Calif. and Minnetonka, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- June 26, 2000

By Simply Entering Questions in Plain English nQuire Answers & the

nQuire Suite Provide Employees, Partners and Customers with Analytic

Power and Up-to-the-Minute Answers from Data

nQuire Software Inc., announced today the availability of the nQuire Suite 2.0, which includes an update to all existing products and a brand new product in the suite, nQuire Answers(TM). nQuire Answers enables companies to provide any authorized user with the ability to ask questions in plain English and get answers and intelligence from data. Through integration with the newly upgraded nQuire Server, nQuire Answers is able to respond to factual questions -- even those requiring complex calculations, access to the largest data warehouses and data from multiple sources and systems. The nQuire Suite 2.0 is the first complete Internet Intelligence Platform providing Internet-based self-service access to relevant, up-to-the-moment information at the time it is needed, for any member of a company's business/commerce network -- customers, partners, suppliers and employees.

The competitive dynamics of modern business are challenging companies to provide relevant and actionable information to new and broader audiences inside and outside the organization, while simultaneously managing and deriving value from the huge volumes of detailed data captured through traditional and e-Business activities. Those with the ability to maximize the reach and value of this detailed information, and translate it into optimized actions and interactions, will be in a position to increase business efficiencies and gain competitive advantage. In the face of these marketplace demands and technical challenges, many industry analysts and experts believe that a new class of solution is needed -- an "Internet Intelligence Platform."

With today's announcement, nQuire becomes the first company to deliver a complete Internet Intelligence Platform, providing strong capabilities in all 12 required areas as defined by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI), a leading independent authority and provider of education and research in the data warehousing, business intelligence and information management industry. TDWI and other experts cite deploying an Internet Intelligence Platform as a critical part of the next generation internet, extranet and intranet infrastructure for Global-2000 companies, leading e-Businesses and e-Marketplace providers.

"To survive and compete in today's economy, companies must be able to provide up to the minute and actionable information to the broad workforce, and throughout the complete business network," said Mark Smith, program director with META Group. "But this requires immediate and intuitive analytic access to relevant information from the large volumes of data often distributed across sources and systems. nQuire delivers an innovative new architectural and user interface approach required to meet these challenges that are not addressed by traditional business intelligence tools."

"The average person can use the Web for self-service access to information that is scattered across the Internet, yet data captured and stored within a company is inaccessible for most," said Larry Barbetta, CEO and President of nQuire Software. "With today's announcement, we remove the barriers that have stood between the average person and the information they need. Now companies can provide all constituents with self-service access to relevant and real-time `information intelligence' from vast amounts of data and can make these capabilities a part of their intranet, extranet and internet platforms."

nQuire Answers

nQuire Answers was developed to address the challenges of information accessibility for the broad workforce, partners and customers. The result is self-service access to relevant, up-to-the-moment and actionable information over the Internet. Traditional approaches, while suitable for power users and technical professionals, have proven too complex for use by these new audiences, and have not provided the timely and relevant information they require.

With nQuire Answers, users are able to get answers and intelligence by simply entering factual questions in plain English about subject areas or topics defined to the nQuire Server. Questions are interpreted and passed to the nQuire Server for: determining which data sources need to be accessed; generating optimized physical requests for these sources; and performing necessary information integration and analytics.

Analytic power is needed as answers to most factual questions require calculations that go beyond simply issuing database queries. Ironically, what is often seen by users as the most basic business questions are the most difficult to answer from a technical perspective. nQuire Answers has the analytic power needed and responds with up-to-the-minute information and answers to factual questions like: Who are my top 10 customers across all lines of business and sales channels? What are my fastest growing product lines and which demographic groups are contributing to that growth? What is the contribution to profit of heavy buyers of a particular product category? What are the historical purchases, status of current orders and key product opportunities, and are there any recent complaints for the customer I am about to call on? Which supplier has the highest percentage of timely order fill rates with at least 1,000 units of my desired product in inventory?

nQuire Answers contains a learning engine that gains knowledge through regular use of the terms, concepts and measurements specific and unique to the information. The question-answering interface is also fully integrated with point-and-click capabilities based on logical items to provide users with an intuitive way to form requests that go beyond language interpretation capabilities (which then become part of the learning engine's knowledge base).

Results provided by nQuire Answers can be further enhanced through its intuitive charting, result layout, calculation and drill-down capabilities - all of which are performed on the server, requiring no applets, plug-ins or client-side software other than a Web browser. Anything created with nQuire Answers can be saved, organized, shared and integrated with other important content - such as documents, Web content, and relevant external news - using nQuire portal templates. These portal templates can be viewed with a browser or embedded/integrated into any internal or external Web application, portal or Web site.

The nQuire Server

The nQuire Server was developed to overcome the "data challenges" in this era of e-Business. This high performance server is capable of dealing with the largest data warehouses, and can reach beyond the boundaries of any single data store and unify information from transactional, operational, and analytic data stores in relational, host and XML-based systems. The nQuire Server's sophisticated query generation and calculation engines provide the analytical capabilities needed to deliver meaningful intelligence from data. This functionality is necessary to provide up-to-the-minute information at the time it is needed, to the person who needs it. With these capabilities, the nQuire Suite enables entirely new classes of intelligence solutions providing external parties and the broad workforce with relevant, real-time information, fused with historical and comparative information for opportunity identification, enhanced decision-making, and the ability to impact interactions, service levels and responsiveness.

The nQuire Server also adds value to, and integrates with, a wide range of data access oriented products, development tools and applications to leverage existing investments. Through its ANSI standard SQL-select interface, the nQuire Server provides out-of-the-box interoperability with virtually any reporting, OLAP, query, and development tool, as well as data access applications. It enhances these solutions by providing a simplified and logical view of information, physical schema independence, advanced calculations, support for large data volumes, and the ability to seamlessly and efficiently bring together data from multiple sources and systems.

    Additional nQuire Suite 2.0 Highlights

      In addition to the nQuire Answers product, this release contains
important enhancements to all products in the nQuire Suite. Some of
the highlights include:

      -- nQuire Adapters for access to new data sources and systems
including a wide range of host sources (IMS, VSAM, IDMS, etc.) and
enhanced XML access; and enhancements to the query generation, join
and calculation engines for optimized interaction with these new
sources and systems. These features were driven by needs of
Global-2000 and e-Market/B2B companies.

      -- new calculation capabilities include affinity, segmentation and
associative analytics and dimension-specific calculations and
aggregation rules. These are particularly valuable in retail/consumer
products, financial services, health care/pharmaceuticals and
e-commerce.

      -- security enhancements include LDAP authentication with
group/role privileges. Also, security integration for supporting user
role and authentication in large-scale external user deployments.

      -- support for the latest versions of the Windows NT operating
systems and optimizations to take advantage of features in new
releases of the major relational database platforms.

      -- enhancements to the nQuire Administrator to ease and speed
implementation and maintenance.

      -- continued improvements in scalability and performance, with
particular emphasis on supporting very large user and data
environments, and in large SMP server configurations (4 CPUs and
above).

Pricing, Availability, and Platforms

The nQuire Suite 2.0, which includes nQuire Answers, is available immediately with license pricing starting at $125,000, and subscription pricing starting at $8,000 per month. The nQuire Suite runs on Windows NT Server, with ODBC and native driver interfaces to major relational databases from companies including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, NCR/Teradata, Sybase, Informix, and Informix/RedBrick. Other sources are accessible via ODBC-compliant drivers, nQuire's XML adapter and host/legacy access is provided with nQuire's Host adapter.

About nQuire Software

Since nQuire publicly launched the company and its products late last year, it has been recognized as an "Emerging Company to Watch" by ComputerWorld; featured in "What's Hot" by InformationWeek; selected to demonstrate at the prestigious Upside Showcase Conference, and featured as "Company of the Month" in Global Business Technology. nQuire provides its solutions to visionary Global 2000 companies, leading e-Businesses, e-Marketplaces, and Application Service Providers, through direct and indirect/OEM sales channels. Founded in late 1997, the experienced nQuire team has created some of the most successful companies and products in the data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise & Internet server markets. nQuire is privately held with primary offices in San Mateo, CA, and Minnetonka, MN, and regional sales/services offices throughout the United States. nQuire can be reached at 877-635-6206 or at www.nQuire.com.

Note to Editors: nQuire, nQuire Software, nQuire Answers, nQuire.com and the nQuire Server are trademarks or registered trademarks of nQuire Software, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.