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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 18, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 33

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Systems/Enterprise:

ALLEGIS ANNOUNCES ALLEGIS 7.0 EBUSINESS SUITE AVAILABLE

Click Commerce Inc, and its wholly owned subsidiary, Allegis Corporation, announced general availability of the Allegis 7.0 eBusiness Suite, which pushes forward into two critical areas of channel performance that impact revenue -- channel forecasting and enhanced sales data.

The Allegis eBusiness Suite encompasses over 40 components supporting effective selling through indirect channels by systematically improving partner communications and by providing critical visibility into partner workflow and channel revenue. Supported channel business processes include partner recruitment and profiling, lead distribution, market segmentation, training and certification, channel forecasting and point-of-sale analysis, and marketing funds management. The 7.0 release includes new tools to reduce the cycle-time and improve the accuracy of the channel forecasting process, improvements to existing workflow and tracking tools, support for seven new languages, all coupled to evolutionary performance improvements in the Allegis Team Engine infrastructure.

"The 7.0 release proves that Click Commerce is delivering on our mission to provide our customers with the technology and the information they need to make every channel interaction and every channel investment more timely and more profitable," said Nancy Koenig, vice president of product operations. "With every release, we are making improvements to performance and to functionality to help customers gain ever stronger control of their indirect channel processes."

Channel Forecasting allows companies to invite channel partners directly into forecasting process. The ability to forecast sales through indirect channels is a challenge for every enterprise. Because channel sales data is often housed in several disparate systems, many companies rely on error-prone manual processes to keep track of forecast information. The Channel Forecasting feature provides an integrated environment to capture channel forecasts as well as to refine, approve and submit those forecasts. By capturing both units and revenue information, partners can forecast new opportunities and ensure accuracy and accountability through regional roll up and enable management review before forecasts are finalized. When combined with the Allegis eBusiness Suite Channel Sales applications, customers can validate forecasts against actual sales and channel inventory.

Enhanced Channel Sales provides the ability to better manage partner performance to plan Combining actual partner sales data with workflow-enabled business processes means companies can constantly monitor partner performance and automatically steer partners to training, promotions and programs that will improve their ability to sell. The Channel Sales component integrates data provided by channel information providers such as Computer Market Research to enable companies to easily review consolidated sales data, automatically identify strong or weak performing partners during a specific time period, and trigger workflow processes as appropriate. Companies can now proactively reward strong performers while incenting lower performers to improve. "Relying on channel sales data to drive and monitor channel performance is standard practice," said Del Heles, CEO of Computer Market Research, a leading provider of channel sales data. "Integrating channel sales data with a workflow-enabled product like the eBusiness Suite goes a step beyond. By fully leveraging channel sales information gathered by companies like CMR, the Allegis eBusiness Suite is going to help vendors not only optimize their inventory and forecasting processes, but also segment and reward their best performing partners, an important means of increasing partner loyalty."

Improved Support for Microsoft .NET and Web services leads to greater performance and usage tracking Click Commerce's continuing commitment to improving system performance is evident in the significantly higher scalability and throughput capabilities of the 7.0 Allegis eBusiness Suite release. Taking advantage of new features from Microsoft as well as enhancements to the architecture resulted in significant performance improvements across the suite. This improved infrastructure moves the eBusiness Suite even further ahead of the competition in scaling the application to serve global enterprise companies with tens of thousands of partner users.

The Allegis eBusiness Suite also offers support for Web service interfaces. This support, based on the latest industry standards, includes a new Web services framework and supporting documentation and makes it easier for other enterprise and channel partner applications to integrate with eBusiness Suite functions-ensuring that the solution will work seamlessly with customers' existing -- and future -- information systems. About Computer Market Research Computer Market Research, Ltd. is an application service provider of information management solutions. CMR's desktop software and Web-based applications are available as plug and play e-business tools to better manage customer and partner relationships. Since 1985 Computer Market Research Ltd (CMR) has specialized in the development of channel information management software, services and solutions for Fortune 1000 companies.

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