Softface Nets Another Internationally Prestigious Energy Sector Client.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2002

$5 Billion South African Energy Giant Standardizes on Softface's

Technology For Structured Content Creation

Softface, Inc., The Enterprise Content Automation Company, today announced that The Sasol Group, one of the largest and most successful industrial companies in South Africa, has licensed the Softface Content Suite For Procurement Analysis(TM) to make more cost-effective purchasing decisions.

Sasol is one of the largest and most successful industrial companies in South Africa. The Sasol Group of companies comprises diversified fuel, chemical and related manufacturing and marketing operations, complemented by interests in technology development. With approximately $5.4 billion in annual revenues, the company converts coal, which it mines, into synthetic fuel. Sasol also exports gasoline, diesel, heating oils, and related products.

Softface Content, one of the products Softface develops and markets as part of the Softface Content Suite For Procurement Analysis, leverages the industry's first technology that can turn unstructured text into precisely structured, classified content, automatically. Structured, classified content is required fuel for any enterprise-level system, including Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and eProcurement systems. With Softface's solutions, the corporate knowledge locked away in unstructured data throughout an enterprise can be automatically transformed into cost-saving, profit-enhancing content. Until Softface, creating structured content was a manually intensive, expensive process that could take months.

"Making strategic sourcing decisions or implementing an eProcurement environment is very difficult without the right procurement information. We need to know exactly what we bought from whom, at a detail level. Like most Global 2000 companies, our procurement history comes from several systems and is filled with free-form text that contains commodity information. In order to cost-effectively consolidate the data into cleansed, normalized, and classified information, we needed an automated, scalable solution that had natural language capabilities," said Marlene Hubbard, Vice President of Procurement and Supply for Sasol Olefins and Surfactants.

Olivier Sermet, President and CEO of Softface remarked, "Sasol realized that the ability to create structured data from unstructured text automatically was of primary importance to their procurement analysis efforts. Structured data is the fuel of every enterprise system in the world, including analysis engines. Even before Sasol attended training for Softface Content, they installed Softface Content and successfully classified over 57,000 purchased items to the UNSPSC in a matter of hours. They saved one man-year of effort in that one classification effort, and that's just the beginning. The Softface Content Suite offers a completely repeatable, automatic model. What Sasol has acquired in licensing Softface Content is a repeatable model to perpetually create structured content for all their systems without having to spend a penny more. That's the beauty of an automated solution."

Defining Enterprise Content Automation

Behind the walls of every enterprise are vast stores of unstructured, untapped data, ranging from procurement, customer order, and other transaction history to cryptic inventory product descriptions. Transforming that "dirty data" into highly structured, information-rich enterprise content, easily digestible by ERP, CRM, sell-side catalog, analytical, and eProcurement analytical systems, yields increased product sales through better product content, enhanced profitability through detailed procurement analysis, and more accurate information availability at the corporate level. Historically, because large amounts of unstructured data is difficult to manually process, the data transformation process has been tediously manual, expensive, and undependable. Softface's patent-pending core technology is the first and only software that automatically, at a rate of tens of thousands of entries per hour, generates structured content and relevant attributes from plain-text descriptions with a high degree of precision. While other products offer rudimentary keyword searching or product attribute approximations, Softface enables enterprise content automation by coupling its comprehensive grammar interpreting technology with comprehensively digitized domain expertise. The result is automatically cleansed, classified, rationalized and normalized enterprise content that is rich with highly accurate product attributes.

About Sasol

Sasol, established in 1950, is a world-leader in the commercial production of liquid fuels and chemicals from coal and crude oil. The company has a turnover of more than US$5-billion per year and is listed on the JSE Securities Exchange (SOL) with a market capitalization of more than US$5-billion and on NASDAQ (SASOY) in New York. Sasol manufactures more than 200 fuel and chemical products at its plants in Sasolburg and Secunda in South Africa as well as at several other plants abroad. Its products are exported to more than 90 countries around the world. The company has developed world-leading technology for the commercial production of synthetic fuels and chemicals from low-grade coal as well as the conversion of natural gas to environment-friendly diesel and chemicals. Internet address: www.sasol.com.

About Softface

Softface is the emerging de-facto standard for Enterprise Content Automation. Softface's Content Solution Suites speed and simplify unstructured data classification and attribute extraction, enabling Global 2000 customers to leverage untapped corporate knowledge in order to make more cost-effective decisions, increase revenues, and enhance profits. Softface's patent-pending, highly scalable core technology is the first and only software that automatically generates structured content and relevant attributes from plain-text descriptions with a high degree of precision. Softface is a privately held company located in Walnut Creek, California. For more information on Softface, visit the company's web site at www.softface.com or call 1-925/279-1097.

Softface, Softface Content, Softface Designer, Softface Content Engine, and Softface Content Suite are trademarks of Softface, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.