Corticon Announces Version 2.8 of the Corticon Decision Management Platform; Best Business Rule Engine for Business Process Management.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 2003

Up to Ten Times Faster Than Prior Releases; Ease of Use and Power of Rules Checker Accelerates Development and Maintenance; Momentum Leads Company to Offer Price Incentive to Switch from Other Rules Vendors

Corticon(TM) Technologies, the leading provider of next generation business rule engine software, announced a series of events spearheaded by the introduction of version 2.8 of the Corticon Decision Management Platform. Version 2.8, which will be generally available in late November, runs up to ten times faster than its predecessor, and considerably faster than competitive products when processing large amounts of data.

Over the past few months, Corticon has signed important new customers, establishing leadership as the best business rule engine solution for automated business processes. New customers include several state agencies, STW Fixed Income Management and WellFound. Seeking powerful solutions to automate best business practices and other decision-making processes, these customers were drawn to Corticon's ease of use, flexibility, and ability to automatically check rules for logical correctness. After their initial project success, customers commonly use the Corticon solution to manage business rules across multiple enterprise applications.

"We expect to reduce our cycle time for deciding when to withhold union dues for some of the over 400,000 providers in the state system by between 30-to-50 percent," said Bonnie Moonchild, SSPS Project Manager, Department of Health and Social Services for the State of Washington. "We expect additional withholding requirements this year. Corticon's business rules solution will enable us to check the rules we develop before we implement them, to make sure they are complete and non-conflicting, saving us both time and money."

"Corticon has made it possible for STW Fixed Income Management to offer the best solution in the industry for client compliance systems," said Tony Plasil, CIO of the $8 Billion investment firm. "We avoid making trades that violate a client's investment guidelines and thus avoid the transaction costs and losses associated with undoing erroneous trades. Furthermore, STW has incorporated Corticon rules technology in its portfolio accounting system. This allows STW to apply user-defined rules to calculate the actual tax expense for client portfolios. The rules can be changed as the business environment and regulations demand, and then redeployed without programming--something other third-party products can't provide."

As companies in the rapidly growing, highly competitive business process management (BPM) marketplace seek to differentiate themselves, market leaders such as Action Technologies, HandySoft, Intalio, and Staffware are turning to partnerships with Corticon. That way, they simplify the design of complex decision-making process steps that might otherwise require elaborate coding that is difficult to develop and maintain. Corticon's ability to enable business process owners, who typically lack programming skills, to build and maintain decision automation rules that are guaranteed to deliver complete and unambiguous decisions led to these important partnerships.

"Corticon's ability to automatically highlight logical inconsistencies and gaps in the rules at design time is essential in a BPM environment since the accuracy of process execution depends on determining the correct decision," said Paul Young, Chief Products Officer of Staffware. "A key aspect of the Independent Process Layer our BPM solution provides is the ability to put control of the process in the hands of the business. That's why Corticon's spreadsheet style interface was also important as it allows business users, not programmers, to define and maintain the rules."

Corticon customers who have switched from the programmer-heavy requirements of their competitors' rule engine technology have been able to reduce cycle times from months to days and eliminate errors in the development of rules. As a result, Corticon has recently unveiled its "Business Rules For The Rest of Us" program, where they are offering deep licensing discounts for those who choose to migrate from other rule vendors to the Corticon Decision Management Platform.

"Many customers have experienced significant benefits after switching from competitive rule engines to Corticon, saving development time and money, improving the quality of their business rule solutions, and empowering a much broader user base to manage the rules," said Eric Kintzer, Vice President of Business Development at Corticon. "We want to share this success with other customers, and are offering considerable discounts to customers of expert system heritage vendors who take advantage of the competitive upgrade offer."

About Corticon Technologies, Inc.

Corticon(TM) Technologies provides the leading enterprise software for automated decision processing. The Corticon Decision Management Platform, a next generation business rule engine, ensures the consistent, efficient and reliable execution of a company's strategies and policies. Unlike competitive products that require skilled programmers, Corticon's solution is as easy to use as a spreadsheet. This results in transformational productivity improvements in key business processes. Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., with an engineering center in Culver City, Calif., Corticon is a venture-backed, privately held company. Visit www.corticon.com for additional company information.