Reasoning Strengthens Its European Presence With Askin Partnership.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 4, 1999--

Spanish Software Provider Chooses Reasoning's Inspector

2000 for Independent Verification and Validation of

Year 2000 Compliance

Reasoning, Inc, a leading supplier of automated software services, has announced an agreement with Askin that allows the Spanish software provider to use the Reasoning Inspector 2000(tm) code inspection service for auditing and confirming its customers' Year 2000 (Y2K) readiness.

Askin is a software development company offering inspection and testing services, technical support services and systems management to a wide and varied client base including many of the most successful companies in Spain. It is also developing Alhambra, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for small to medium sized companies that will be launched later this year.

Commenting on the new agreement, Juan Lestani, business area manager, Askin, said, "More than 90 percent of the applications that have undergone Y2K remediation and testing still contain hundreds of date-related defects. The emphasis must now be on validation and maintenance of compliancy and we are delighted to be able to offer our customers the added Y2K assurance that Inspector 2000 provides. We believe that many Spanish organizations still have a lot of work to be done before they can rest assured that they are ready for the next millennium and Inspector 2000's speed and accuracy will be of very real benefit to latecomers in the inspection process."

Inspector 2000 is an automated software inspection service that systematically inspects remediated code and reports all potentially non-compliant Y2K conditions before code is put back in production. Inspector 2000 may be used to audit internally or externally remediated code, to audit supply chain or software vendor Y2K compliance, to maintain Y2K software repairs, or as an Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) tool. Inspector 2000 reduces the cost and time of Y2K compliance and creates an audit trail of Y2K compliance efforts.

John Rodford, vice president of Reasoning in the United Kingdom stated, "Code inspection is the final, critical process of any Year 2000 project, yet is often neglected due to the time-consuming nature of the earlier stages of testing and remediation. However, the number of latent defects typically found range from 100 to more than 1,000 per million lines of code, including many defects not found in testing. Inspector 2000 is an extremely effective line of defense against Y2K bugs because it consistently inspects remediated code and reports all potentially non-compliant Y2K conditions before code it is put back in production."

Automated inspection of code provides organizations with an independent verification and validation, which not only improves software reliability and decreases software fragility, but also reduces both the time and cost of software maintenance.

Rodford, concluded, "This partnership with Askin is an extremely significant step, strengthening our presence in Europe and offering our international clients even more support. Inspection is going to be something that people will be hearing a lot more of in the 21st century as more and more companies come to rely on doing business over the Internet and software reliability becomes a greater issue than ever before."

About Reasoning Inspector 2000

Reasoning Inspector 2000 enables compliance checks to be done up to 100 times faster and 10 times less expensively than manual code inspection methods. An adjunct to, rather than a replacement for testing, it gives a strong line of defense against Y2K defects by consistently auditing remediated code and documenting all potential Year 2000 non-compliance conditions.

Inspector 2000 may be used to audit code either before or after testing. When used prior to testing, it can accelerate the pace and reduce the costs of Y2K compliance projects. When used after testing, Inspector 2000 can guard against code inadvertently slipping back into non-compliance.

An important feature of Inspector 2000 is that it provides a framework for a customer to define a compliance policy, and then identifies Y2K problem areas in accordance with that policy. This allows it to yield more accurate and rapid inspections, as well as serving as an audit trail to document compliance. The actual inspection process is enhanced by the program's logic flow and data flow mapping, combined with program slicing and artificial intelligence to automatically locate and reliably analyze date-sensitive items in the code. The end result is that millions of lines of code can be accurately inspected within the course of a week.

Reasoning, Inc.

Reasoning, Inc. is global provider of Internet Enterprise Services that enhance the performance and reliability of mission-critical e-business and legacy applications. The company's products and services inspect software for defects, renovate non-Year 2000 compliant software, and enable the transformation of legacy systems to modern client server and Internet architectures. Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Reasoning provides sales and services in North America. Europe and Asia-Pacific. Visit the Reasoning web site at www.reasoning.com

Askin

Askin is a leading European software supplier, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, with offices in Barcelona and Grenada and a large customer base in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, France and Portugal. Founded in 1991, the company has achieved annual growth rates of 100 percent for the last four years and its customers now number over 400, including many of the most successful companies in Spain. Visit the Askin website at www.askin.es

Reasoning, Inspector 2000, and the Reasoning logo are trademarks and/or service marks of Reasoning, Inc. All other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.