N.E.W. Customer Service Companies Selects Corticon Business Rules for Claims Processing and Adjudication; Improved Agility and Compliance Lead Benefits of Automating Rules of Extended Service Plans.

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Corticon Technologies, the leading provider of business rules management software, today announced that N.E.W. Customer Service Companies (NEW) will use Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS) to enhance their warranty claims processing services. NEW is the nation's leading provider of extended service contracts and buyer protection programs for consumer products. NEW will use Corticon's BRMS to streamline the processing of warranty claims, while ensuring that policies are enforced consistently and in an auditable manner. This will support NEW's on-going efforts to reduce operational costs and processing errors while also improving compliance with each of NEW's customers' unique warranty service agreements.

NEW administers and processes claims against extended service plans sold by its clients, which include leading retailers such as Best Buy, JC Penney, Lowe's, Kmart, OfficeMax and Sam's Club. NEW faces the difficult challenge of consistently adjudicating and processing claims against policies that each have their own unique set of rules. By modeling each client's set of claims rules in Corticon, NEW has the opportunity to automate and enforce uniform standards for claims processing, while also analyzing and streamlining their claims management process. Corticon's Excel-like user-interface will provide NEW's business users the ability to build and make changes as their business rules and policies are created or changed. Additionally, Corticon's ability to easily check rules for ambiguity and completeness will make it easier for NEW to maintain quality control and strict oversight of claims payments.

"Warranty programs generate over $1.8 billion a year in incremental revenue for our clients, who are some of the world's largest publicly-traded companies" said Bob Moran, Senior Vice President and CIO at NEW. "Understandably, our customers demand consistent and transparent enforcement of their warranty policies. Corticon BRMS will help us ensure compliance with our clients' policies, while providing the most efficient and agile solution, which will save us time and money."

"Our relationship with NEW highlights a market opportunity for Corticon: companies looking to enforce policy across business transactions, with the capability for fast change and verification of compliance enforcement. This is the essence of corporate governance and policy enforcement," said Mark Allen, co-founder and President of Corticon Technologies. "As a company, NEW has recognized our competitive differentiators, including our ease-of-use and our ability to guarantee the intended results delivered by rules modeled in Corticon. They also realized, however, that automating the rules related to warranty claims adjudication would not only result in savings of time and money, but would also enable them to assure their clients that they are in compliance with these important internal controls."

"A compliance system is deemed successful when it can prove a company is following the rules. Companies that bring together diverse requirements into a holistic approach get the most benefit," said John Hagerty, Vice President, AMR Research. "AMR Research has established guidance for CIOs and their teams to wrestle the broader compliance issues to the ground. One of the nine key technology components that make active compliance possible are rules engines, to store all compliance-related business rules, independent of the transaction and reporting systems that are part of any compliance regimen." (Planning for a Sustainable Compliance Architecture, February 26, 2004, John Hagerty)

Corticon offers a unique and powerful solution for enterprise compliance and policy enforcement problems: software products that enable organizations to manage their policies in an executable form. Corticon BRMS helps organizations model and understand their policies, whether deriving from external sources (e.g. regulations, customer contracts) or internal strategies and objectives. In addition, Corticon BRMS can automate the enforcement of polices via standards-based integration with enterprise systems, ensuring that polices are enforced efficiently, consistently and transparently.

About N.E.W. Customer Service Companies

N.E.W. Customer Service Companies, Inc. (www.newcorp.com) is the nation's leading provider of extended service plans, buyer protection services and product support for businesses and consumers. With more than 20 years experience, NEW provides exceptional post-sale consumer care for many of the nation's largest retailers, manufacturers, utilities and financial services firms, providing coverage last year to more than 100 million consumers. Through its commitment to customer care, NEW delivers ongoing revenue, unrivaled customer support, seamless service administration and the competitive edge needed to succeed in a rapidly changing marketplace. This philosophy has positioned the company as the leader in the marketing and administration of extended service plans and other value-added buyer protection and information services.

NEW is headquartered in Dulles, VA, and operates six communication centers located in Montana, Florida, Virginia, Kansas and Oregon. NEW has over 2,300 employees nationwide. For more information, please visit N.E.W. at www.newcorp.com or call 1-800 WHAT'S NEW

About Corticon Technologies, Inc. - Corticon's Business Rules Management System (BRMS) helps organizations eliminate their policy-execution gap; the gap between what executives need to happen ("policy") and what actually occurs ("execution"). Many of the world's most successful organizations rely on Corticon-powered solutions to eliminate operational risk, reduce operational cost, and improve operational agility. Corticon's patent-pending BRMS delivers the industries only business rules modeling, analysis and automation that can ensure the consistent, efficient and reliable execution of a company's business rules and policies. Unlike competitive products that require skilled programmers, Corticon BRMS is as easy to use as a spreadsheet, thus empowering business users and lowering total cost of ownership. Acknowledgement of Corticon's industry changing solution includes Gartner's positioning of Corticon in the Leaders' Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Business Rules Engines, 2005.

To learn more about Corticon's products, customers, and partners, visit us at www.corticon.com or contact us at 1-650-212-2424.