RCG IT Wins Outsourcing Deal For Reader's Digest; Outsourcing Helps Companies Strengthen IT Support and Service.

Business and Technology Editors

EDISON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2001

RCG Information Technology, Inc. (www.rcgit.com), a national leader in IT professional services, will provide The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (NYSE:RDA) application maintenance and testing support services for their Marketing Database System.

RCG IT is providing a staff of approximately 20 IT consultants with skills and experience to match Reader's Digest's technical environment consisting of Cobol2, DB2, RAMIS, JCL, CICS, Sybase, Access, Excel and Visual Basic systems. The staff, which provides in-house 7x24 production and emergency support, is managed by an RCG IT project manager. Reader's Digest expects that as a result of this arrangement, they will improve support to the business as well as data quality. In addition, these activities will benefit from the application of best practices and disciplined project management.

"RCG IT was a natural choice, since they worked on many of our projects over a two-year period," says Rob Hilliard, Vice-President, Customer Technologies. "We felt very comfortable giving RCG IT this responsibility. They understand our objectives and culture."

The new project follows a recently completed two-year project in which RCG IT participated in a multivendor/Reader's Digest team tasked with integrating in-house systems with those of the external fulfillment vendor. RCG IT supported the reconciliation and conversion of millions of customer files to a format compatible with the external fulfillment vendor's system and assisted in building interfaces between the fulfillment vendor and Reader's Digest's reporting and forecasting systems.

"Companies with smaller IT departments are opting for operational support outsourcing to assist with their development and maintenance needs," says Joe Siciliano, RCG IT Senior VP for the NY Region. "RCG IT has a large consultant talent pool onshore and offshore to match skills to most IT requirements, be they mainframe, mid-range client/server, web-based or legacy applications."

About RCG Information Technology

RCG Information Technology is a national leader in IT professional services specializing in strategy and design, application development, integration and management. Practices include: e-Solutions, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing, Extended Application Solutions (ERP II) and Application Management. The firm serves over 500 customers, including 45 of the Fortune 100, in a broad range of markets, including financial services, energy, healthcare, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, government, manufacturing, distribution and retail. RCG IT is certified company-wide at the Capability Maturity Model(R) of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (SEI SW-CMM(R)). RCG IT is based in Edison, New Jersey, with 22 offices nationwide, an Offshore Delivery Center in the Philippines and a global recruiting engine. It employs a staff of approximately 2,000.

About Reader's Digest Association

The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. is a global leader in publishing and direct marketing, creating and delivering products that inform, enrich, entertain and inspire people of all ages and cultures. The company's flagship magazine, Reader's Digest, is published in 48 editions in 19 languages and reaches millions of readers in more than 60 countries. The company has built a global customer base that ranks among the world's largest. Today, the company is expanding into other distribution channels including direct-response television, display marketing, catalogs, retail and the Internet. The Reader's Digest Association was founded in 1922, by Lila and DeWitt Wallace, and it went public in 1990, trading on the NYSE.