Itemfield and Unicorn Partner to Deliver Real-Time Data Integration for ACORD to the Insurance Sector; Companies Partner to Offer the Industry's First Model-Driven Integration Solution.

SAN MATEO, Calif. & NEW YORK -- Itemfield, Inc., the leading provider of next-generation data transformation software for high-performance mission-critical applications, and Unicorn Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise architecture and metadata management solutions, today announced a joint solution for real-time application and data integration for mid and large-sized insurers. This announcement was made today at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum 2005 in Orlando, Florida.

Itemfield and Unicorn have already integrated their platforms in working together on a series of IBM Insurance Solutions, as well as with Fortune 1000 insurance carriers to validate this combined approach to Model-Driven Integration. As the first step in enabling their customers and channel partners, the two companies will offer a Model-Driven Integration Assessment Service, a fast-start services offering geared toward delivering rapid readiness assessments. The Insurance Solution, which will be demonstrated at the ACORD/LOMA event in Pedestals 35 and 38 in the IBM Life Zone and in Booth 1925, represents the insurance industry's first Model-Driven Integration Solution that unites enterprise data management and real-time insurance bus initiatives.

Faced with the competitive pressures of a maturing industry, insurers are seeking to make more effective real-time use of data about customers and products both internally and among all of the parties in the value chain. To enable this vision for information-on-demand, insurers are embracing an emerging trend in data management and integration known as EIM, or Enterprise Information Management, which seeks to provide consistent interpretation of structured and unstructured business data across multiple domains and systems. According to Gartner, "Through 2007, 20 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will deploy an enterprise-level EIM strategy in support of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Building an SOA without an EIM strategy will significantly lower the response to business process choreography, and one of the main benefits of SOBAs (Service-Oriented Business Applications) will be lost." ("Service-Oriented Business Applications Require EIM Strategy," March 30, 2005). The realization of EIM, however, is made more difficult by the traditional divide between the design of enterprise data models and the integration process itself. The resulting integration architectures often fail to support data quality and consistency, leading to costly data errors and slow, inflexible, and high-maintenance integrations.

The joint Unicorn-Itemfield Insurance Solution overcomes this problem by combining metadata management and real-time data transformation within a single Model-Driven Integration Solution that fully integrates data models into the real-time infrastructure. Model-Driven Integration, a new paradigm for supporting EIM, utilizes tools commonly used by business and data analysts such as Microsoft Excel to automatically enrich reference data models such as the ACORD standard with the contextual information needed to support SOAs and to drive key applications such as real-time Business Intelligence, Enterprise Information Integration, and compliance dashboards. The EIM layer enabled by the Unicorn-Itemfield Model-Driven Integration Solution provides semantic end-to-end data quality assurance for SOAs and orchestrated business processes. This yields extensive business and technology benefits including the reduction of system maintenance costs by enabling the consolidation of databases, metadata and business rule registries, the acceleration of transformation and service enablement of legacy systems, and the ability to more rapidly enter new channels and markets.

"To succeed in today's business environment, insurance carriers need to share large amounts of data between back-office systems, emerging channels, and external entities within their value chains," said Dan Carmel, CEO of Itemfield. "By uniting our customer's data and integration architectures to enable real-time execution of core business processes, Unicorn and Itemfield are delivering the first middleware solution that links a best-in-class metadata management repository and tools with a comprehensive, any-to-any shared transformation service to provide end-to-end semantic data quality assurance reporting and error detection/correction in real-time. Our Model-Driven Integration Solution provides insurers with process efficiencies, greater flexibility and responsiveness, and significantly lower overall data processing costs."

Zvi Schreiber, Unicorn's CEO, said "Many insurers who need to adopt the ACORD standard are also attempting to migrate complex and mission-critical system interfaces to Web Services and XML. Together with Itemfield, this partnership offers a Model-Driven Integration Solution that includes a robust platform to help automate the migration of legacy interfaces, maps, integration rules, and a Shared Transformation Service unifying data management and data integration."

Unicorn's commitment to the ACORD standard and its implementation of a reference data model based on that standard provide the foundation for standards-based exchange between data and business services in the joint solution. This foundation has been integrated with Itemfield ContentMaster, which provides real-time data transformation and any-to-any, multi-version mapping of ACORD and other key industry data and transaction standards. While the Unicorn For Insurance Solution and the Unicorn System provide full lifecycle metadata management and mapping of the ACORD standards to enterprise data models and metadata, Itemfield ContentMaster automatically generates real-time executable transformations from Unicorn Data Maps, while providing multi-version mapping support from ACORD and AL3 to numerous enterprise application and information resources. Itemfield transformations are fully embeddable and can execute on any software infrastructure platform, including application servers, ESBs, integration brokers, and ETL platforms. In addition to supporting EIM, the Solution plays a key role in enabling insurers to tie together fragmented components of their overall data architecture while ensuring data quality and consistency between orchestrated systems in an SOA.

About Itemfield ContentMaster

Itemfield ContentMaster simplifies business integration by allowing any form of enterprise data to be transformed to any other form of data in real-time via XML. Content Master features a comprehensive visual design environment that reduces development time by up to 90% and an embeddable execution environment optimized to run within a variety of EAI, B2B and middleware platforms. With ContentMaster, organizations

can rapidly develop, deploy and maintain new applications that integrate complex documents, transaction data, proprietary content, and legacy data formats.

About Itemfield, Inc.

Itemfield is the leading provider of next-generation data transformation software for high-performance, mission-critical applications. Leading companies including AT&T, Philips, GMAC Financial Services, Ogilvy & Mather, Fireman's Fund, Per-Se Technologies and Pitney Bowes rely on Itemfield ContentMaster to reduce implementation costs and accelerate solution delivery for business integration, including EAI, B2B, legacy modernization and SOA enablement. Itemfield is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with sales offices across the U.S. and distribution worldwide. More information on Itemfield is available at http://www.itemfield.com.

About Unicorn Solutions, Inc.

Unicorn Solutions is the world's leader in Enterprise Architecture and Metadata Management. Unicorn's ONE Enterprise paradigm delivers unprecedented transparency, integration, IT efficiency, and agility to the Global 1000. ONE Enterprise delivers this value to lines of business and the overall enterprise by managing their disparate IT systems, creating a common business architecture, and overlaying the common business architecture on the IT systems. As a result, businesses rapidly develop and update their common business language and processes while rationalizing the IT systems on which they are executed. The Unicorn System(TM) enables the ONE Enterprise paradigm with capabilities that include: metadata repository, ontology modeling, semantic mapping, active design services, active IT management services, and federated business querying. Industry standard libraries accelerate ONE Enterprise adoption in the insurance, financial services, and government sectors. For more information, visit http://www.unicorn.com.

(C) 2005, Itemfield Inc. All Rights Reserved. Itemfield and ContentMaster are trademarks of Itemfield Inc. All other product or company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

(C) 2005 Unicorn Solutions Inc. All rights reserved. Unicorn, the Unicorn logo, One Enterprise, and product and component names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unicorn Solutions, Inc. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners. Patents pending. Product features subject to change.