Fulcrum signs major licensing agreement with Elsag Bailey; major player in European market for integrated image and document management offers Fulcrum's search engine.

OTTAWA, Canada--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 1995--Fulcrum Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:FULCF) Monday announced that it had signed an agreement with the Document Processing Department of Elsag Bailey.

Elsag Bailey, a Finmeccanica company based in Genoa, Italy, is well known in Europe, primarily for recognition and postal automation systems. Fulcrum SearchServer, the content-based retrieval engine, will join the family of technologies that make up the company's comprehensive product offering.

Elsag Bailey's ARCHEA Document Application Management and its Slamnet ICR System offer a distributed a document processing architecture for document and data capture and reading, and for image and document management.

In the past year, Elsag Bailey has been moving its technology from high-end, proprietary and closed systems used in very large, sophisticated applications, to an open client/server model that can be more easily customized to suit a wide range of end-user applications.

"Text retrieval was already a component of our product offering," said Gianni Germanis, director of the document processing department at Elsag Bailey.

"But the engine we were using was not as well-suited to the kind of open, client/server applications that Fulcrum's SearchServer can readily support. Increasingly, the company is bringing its technology to the corporate mainstream, where features like content-based retrieval are very attractive."

"Elsag Bailey offers a product that bridges the gap between the world of paper and the world of digital information," said Peter Eddison, Fulcrum's vice president of marketing. "By combining features like sophisticated character recognition and forms removal with the Fulcrum search engine, the company is positioning itself to appeal to a whole new corporate market."

In the field of automation services, the Document Processing Department of Elsag Bailey has been created to provide customers with technological planning tools and skills, to integrate hardware and software for business process automation and re-engineering, and to supply highly qualified services.

Today the department employs more than 150 specialists in its Genoa headquarters and in offices in Rome, Milan, Toronto, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, Madrid and Barcelona.

Since 1983, Fulcrum Technologies has been a leading vendor of text-retrieval software because of the strength of its core indexing and searching engine, its open systems strategy, and its tools approach. Used by large and medium-sized organizations, Fulcrum's software provides access to corporate intellectual capital stored electronically, in particular on client/server computer networks.

Fulcrum customers include Microsoft (The Microsoft Network), Fujitsu, National Semiconductor, Florida Power and Banca di Roma. Fulcrum's technology is also licensed for use in products offered by Saros, Interleaf, Frame and Corel, among others. With headquarters in Ottawa, Fulcrum is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol "FULCF."

CONTACT: Fulcrum Technologies

Gillian Brouse, 613/238-1761

gillianb(at-sign)fultech.com

or

Elsag Bailey

Giovanna Barabino, 39-10-658-23-25

or

Rourke & Co.

Sally Winship, 617/267-0042

swinship(at-sign)rourke.com