Nextance and Alliance Consulting Team Up to Help Pharmaceutical Industry.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Partnership Delivers Thought Leadership, Best Practices and Leading Contract Management System to One of the World's Largest Pharmaceutical Companies

Nextance Inc., the leader in contract performance management (CPM) solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Alliance Consulting, a leading national business intelligence solutions consultancy, to deliver both best practices and best-of-breed technology to optimize contract management processes for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies.

With both companies as deep subject-matter experts in CPM as well as in pharmaceutical and other industries, the partnership marries Alliance's best-practice and business expertise with Nextance's leading-edge technology. The partnership is already off to a quick start, as the team works on its first joint implementation at one of the world's largest and most respected pharmaceutical leaders with more than $18 billion in annual revenue and hundreds of thousands of contracts to manage.

John Wollman, EVP and chief technology officer of Alliance Consulting, described the market need for this new relationship: "Pharmaceutical companies have typically approached contract performance management to address only sell-side applications, such as rebate management, and to ensure compliance with stringent regulatory demands. We're helping clients leverage the full value of CPM to enhance revenue while improving compliance and containing costs. We are able to give these organizations a sizeable competitive advantage by optimizing the right processes and using Nextance's market-leading CPM system to manage commitments and performance across the entire enterprise."

The sheer number and complexity of a pharmaceutical company's co-development and co-marketing agreements alone make managing contracts a staggering task. Add to that the political, economic and regulatory pressures facing the pharmaceutical industry -- such as compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, more stringent FDA quality requirements, managing information privacy, downward pricing pressure and market share battles -- it becomes clear why CPM is now a priority for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Companies that are not proactively ensuring visibility into all agreements and contractual obligations within in-license, out-license and other commercialization agreements risk financial penalty, uncollected receivables, lost opportunities and other negative business outcomes.

"We're excited to formalize our partnership with Alliance Consulting -- it's a natural progression of our work to date," said Kyle Bowker, president and chief executive officer of Nextance. "Combined, we complete the contract performance management puzzle with our unmatched technology and their expert consulting services. Together, we create a higher value proposition for our customers and are working to bring our joint solution to other companies in the pharmaceutical, life sciences and other industries."

About Nextance Inc.

Nextance is setting the standard for contract performance management (CPM) solutions with innovative software and best-practices professional services. Global 2000 companies are improving financial and business performance by using Nextance CPM to improve the standardization, visibility and control of their contractual relationships. Countrywide, Covenant Health, Eastman Chemical Company, Fireman's Fund, Genzyme Corporation, Google, Juniper Networks, Peabody Energy, Sasol, Sun Microsystems, and others are using Nextance software every day to tap into the value that is written into each of their thousands of revenue, procurement, intellectual property licensing, and partner agreements. Nextance is based in Redwood City, CA, and is privately held. For additional information, visit: www.nextance.com.

About Alliance Consulting

Alliance Consulting delivers IT consulting and software solutions to targeted clients worldwide. Alliance Consulting's solutions encompass strategic IT and business intelligence consulting, custom application development and packaged software integration, data warehouse integration and application management outsourcing. Alliance Consulting is a wholly owned subsidiary of Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. For more information, please visit www.allianceconsulting.com.

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