GE EXTENDS INFO MANAGEMENT OUTSOURCING CONTRACT WITH SOPHEON.

Arrangement Combines Human and Technology-based Research Capabilities to Lower Cost and Improve Speed and Scope of Information Support to Knowledge Workers

Sopheon, an international knowledge management software and services company, has signed a new four-year contract with General Electric under which GE will continue to outsource its information management services to Sopheon.

The contract extends a six-year-old outsourcing relationship between Sopheon and GE in which Sopheon acts as a virtual library for the corporation and certain of its operating units in industries ranging from financial services to aircraft engines to medical devices. Functional groups served by Sopheon's information management solution include R&D, product development, business professionals and general counsel.

"Our outsourcing partnership with General Electric builds on Sopheon's substantial history as one of their primary information service providers," said Andy Michuda, chief executive officer of Sopheon. "It's a relationship that exemplifies our capacity to integrate human interaction and content with the efficiencies of technology to deliver comprehensive, cost-effective information support."

GE accesses Sopheon's services through a custom-designed co-branded portal that enables both do-it-yourself research and direct electronic access to a dedicated research staff with academic and industry expertise hand-picked to meet GE's specific technical, business and legal research needs. Sopheon uses "smart" software to aggregate content from the Web, published literature and proprietary information collections as required by GE knowledge workers.

"It's a technology-rich approach that is contributing measurably to GE's announced company-wide initiatives of globalization and digitization," said Michuda. "The solution we've delivered supports desktop access to six-sigma quality information management services from anywhere in GE's worldwide operations."

In addition to minimizing the need for corporate information-management infrastructure, Sopheon provides GE with such advantages as access to continuously updated, state-of-the-art service technology; expanded service capabilities; the ability to track and precisely charge service costs back to operating units or functional groups based on usage; and quick, easy expansion to new user constituencies upon demand.

About Sopheon Sopheon (LSE:SPE) is a leading international provider of software-based solutions that enable organizations to more efficiently access internal and external information and turn it into the knowledge to compete. Sopheon serves nearly half of the technology-driven companies on the Fortune 500, providing industry and process-specific software applications that are pre-loaded with specialized content and access to human expertise. They include the Web-enabled Accolade product development system and the award-winning Teltech.com Web-based research portal for technical and business professionals. Sopheon's European headquarters are in Guildford U.K., and its U.S. headquarters are in Minneapolis. The company also has operating bases in Germany and the Netherlands.