Incentive 2.0 Puts Incentive Compensation Management Control Into Business Users' Hands.

Business/Technology Editors

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 21, 2000

New version introduces best practices, expanded user

interface and Web enhancements that let users quickly

build and deploy accurate

incentive plans

Incentive Systems today announced a new version of Incentive(TM), its compensation management software that packages best practices into reusable components and includes new user interface views and faster Web reporting. With these features, Incentive 2.0 is the only enterprise incentive management system (EIM) that lets business users design, model, automate, deploy and report on their incentive plans using one product.

Through its new Component Library, Incentive 2.0 provides users with templates that speed plan implementation and modification. Incentive's enhanced interface allows users to easily perform a wide variety of queries, make bulk changes, and use data validation to further ensure accuracy. New Web enhancements speed up reporting, enabling users to quickly run Web reports so they can track, measure and communicate plan results. These capabilities add up to a solution that enables companies to quickly deploy accurate compensation plans that motivate employees, partners and sales channels to achieve corporate goals.

"In our business the market is changing daily. As a result, we need to make updates to our incentive plans in order to ensure that our employees are motivated to perform in a way that will enable us to achieve our goals. The flexibility and interactivity of Incentive 2.0 will allow us to make changes or create new plans very quickly so that we can align employee objectives with our goals and reward them for achieving those goals at Internet speed," said Todd Cowgill, manager of compensation and benefits at Akamai Technologies, the foremost provider of global, high performance services for the delivery of Internet content and applications.

"State-of-the-art incentive compensation applications are key to managing multiple sales channels, particularly in today's decentralized environments where everyone from sales people to e-commerce partners contribute to the success of the company. This complex environment makes it critical to accurately manage the incentive compensation process," said Katherine Jones, research director at Aberdeen Group. "Incentive 2.0 from Incentive Systems offers the compensation team a robust application to streamline the entire process, including plan design and Web reports, to keep plan participants motivated."

Building on best practices

Incentive's new Component Library is based on industry best practices. The Component Library preserves industry standard knowledge and practices in reusable components. This reduces implementation time and provides customers with a proven approach to enterprise incentive management solutions.

The library includes 78 components that capture common functions such as adding management by objectives or calculating a recoverable draw using one of several common methods available in the library. The library includes components that address the requirements of multi-channel sales models, such as credit assignment, product mix and points-based incentive programs. These components make it easy for companies to create plans that align their direct, indirect and Web sales activities. This alignment is an important capability in today's e-business environment where extended enterprises must motivate and reward a variety of value-added activities across a mix of "click and mortar" channels.

The Component Library also includes sample incentive compensation plans and the most frequently used reports, which are ready for implementation. Incentive stores each component, plan and report as independent XML components so they can be easily added to a company's unique incentive plan.

Built for business users

Incentive 2.0 is designed for business users, providing an interactive, flexible environment that lets them easily manage the compensation process without dependence on their information technology (IT) staff. The software allows users to perform all the functions they need, such as modeling and reporting, by tightly integrating with best-of-breed industry tools.

To further enhance its ease of use, Incentive includes a new forms-based user interface that provides users with more flexibility in how they view and enter information into the system. A new data validation capability further enforces data accuracy, whether users manually input data or feed it into Incentive through an ODBC driver.

Building on the product's strong interactive plan development capabilities, Incentive 2.0 now offers a viewer for intermediate calculations. The number and type of items that have been selected for the plan are displayed in color, allowing retrieval with a simple mouse click.

Web enhancements

Incentive has further enhanced Web capabilities, including a new separate report database that enables users to quickly run Web reporting tools while using the Incentive server for other tasks. Users can easily insert formulas into the HTML-enabled document views, making ad hoc reporting a simple task. Incentive has also embraced the XML standard as the format for exchanging data and plan components.

"Incentive 2.0 incorporates the tools companies need to fully align and motivate the value- producing activities of their extended enterprise. Unlike competing products, which are either custom built or require companies to integrate non-standard third-party tools, Incentive provides organizations with everything they need from one vendor for designing, automating, modeling and reporting on their strategic incentive plans," said Michael Byers, president and CEO of Incentive Systems.

Availability and pricing

Incentive 2.0 is available immediately for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0. The software supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and Internet Explorer 5. Incentive 2.0 is priced at $750 per payee for managing incentive compensation for 200 or more payees.

About Incentive Systems

Incentive Systems, headquartered in Bedford, Mass., is the only commercial software vendor that delivers incentive compensation management systems for extended enterprises and e-business. The company's Incentive(TM) 2.0 product is designed to handle today's dynamic e-commerce business models, enabling companies to motivate every channel involved in customer relationship management to align with corporate goals. More information about the company is available at www.incentivesystems.com.