Open Market and Vality team up to enhance Catalog Centre
Contacts:
Kathleen Piercey
Open Market, Inc. .
(781) 359-7915
kpiercey@openmarket.com
Jill Delaney
Vality Technology, Inc.
(617) 338-0300
jdelaney@vality.com
Stefanie Guzikowski
Beaupre & Co. Public Relations, Inc
(603) 559-5836
sguzikowski@beaupre.com
Investor Contact:
Annmarie Russell
Open Market, Inc.
(781) 359-7589
arussell@openmarket.com
Vality Catalist™, Vality Beacon™ products to offer superior search technology and increased data accuracy for users of online catalogs
BURLINGTON, Mass., July 13, 2001 – Open Market, Inc., (Nasdaq: OMKT), a leading provider of content-driven e-business solutions, and Vality® Technology, the leader in enterprise data quality management software, have signed a co-marketing agreement to offer Vality’s products, Vality Catalist™ and Vality Beacon™, as complementary offerings to Open Market’s Catalog Centre™. Vality’s products which offer information accuracy and advanced search capability are an enhancement to Open Market’s online catalog solution, Catalog Centre.
Catalog Centre creates highly dynamic, easily navigable online product catalogs populated with rich content. Completely compatible with Catalog Centre, Vality Catalist and Vality Beacon enhance the product with outstanding content quality and search capabilities. Catalist prepares catalog data accessed from multiple sources and ensures consistency in terminology, units of measure and categorization. It also provides an intuitive “workbench” for effective ongoing catalog data management. Beacon, a high-speed search engine, delivers dependable, accurate catalog search results tolerating terminology differences and typing, spelling and technical errors to find the most accurate answers for users searching catalogs.
“Data quality is critical for effective online searches and the best site visitor experiences. So Vality Catalist produces the exceptional level of data that catalog producers require and users demand. In head-to-head testing with the most popular search engines, Vality Beacon outpaces them 33-50 percent of the time in finding the right answer and putting it at the top of its list of matches,” said Keith Lietzke, vice president of business development and e-commerce for Vality. “Together these products complement the power of Open Market by performing at high levels before and after Catalog Centre works its magic on a company’s product data.”
Using Catalog Centre, developers can rapidly create product catalogs that include sophisticated searches, comparison tables, and dynamic drill-downs. And Catalog Centre enables content presentation in a very logical and intuitive way—significantly easing the experience of finding and interacting with content in information-heavy sites. It includes an intuitive interface, based on another CSEE product called Content Centre, where business managers can make changes to site information through a standard Web browser. Core to the Catalog Centre architecture is the ability to manage and present content in customizable hierarchies. This capacity supports the demanding requirements of sites that call for the listing and categorization of content, whether product information, news articles, or internal documents.
“Vality’s products will enhance the functionality of our Catalog Centre product, giving site users better accuracy and highly searchable catalog content,” said Joe Alwan, senior vice president for worldwide marketing for Open Market. “Most importantly, Vality’s expertise in these areas will allow our customers’ customers to easily find pertinent information and make decisions based on accurate product descriptions, resulting in an overall better buying experience.”
Vality Catalist and Vality Beacon are available for immediate use with Open Market’s content management and delivery products.
About Vality Technology
Vality® Technology (http://www.vality.com) is the recognized leader in enterprise data quality management and provides customers and partners with data standardization, matching software and consulting services. Vality’s customers and partners represent Global 5000 corporations engaged in finance, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications, energy, and utilities. Some of them include Aetna U.S. Healthcare®, IBM®, Marks & Spencer®, NatWest®, www.onlinesuppliers.com corp.™, Telstra®, and UPS®. These companies rely on Vality’s patent-pending technology to develop and deploy enterprise data quality management solutions that ensure the ROI of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence, e-Commerce and Supply Chain Management (SCM) initiatives. Vality was recently listed in Boston Magazine`s Best Places to Work; and was named one of the 15 Stars of eCommerce by eCom Advisory.
About Open Market
Open Market, Inc. makes content-driven e-business solutions that enable enterprises to better manage interactions with their site visitors, customers, employees, and channels. Leveraging the new Java™ 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) standard, the Company`s software products
are built with Java, JSP and XML and are layered on top of popular application servers like the BEA WebLogic Server, the IBM WebSphere Application Server and the iPlanet Application Server. Open Market’s roster of global customers includes publishers and media companies like The McGraw-Hill Companies, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Company; financial services companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, GE Capital and The Hartford Financial Services Group; and manufacturers like 3Com, BASF and Milacron. The company, headquartered in Burlington, Mass., has customers in 43 countries. Open Market’s international head office is in the U.K. with additional offices in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands and Singapore. Open Market can be reached by calling 1-888-OPEN-MKT (toll-free) or 1-781-359-3000 in the U.S. or +44-1753-838-000 in the U.K. or by visiting http://www.openmarket.com.
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NOTE: The statements contained in this release regarding our new products, strategic alliances and all other statements that are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All such forward-looking statements are based upon information available to us as of the date hereof, and we disclaim any intention or obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from the current expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are set forth under the heading "Certain Factors That May Affect Future Results" in the Company`s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2001. These include risks and uncertainties relating to: our history of operating losses, our ability to execute on our revised strategic plan, our ability to effectively restructure our operations, market acceptance of new product releases, continued development and growth of the content management product market, dependence on third party technology, difficulty in predicting quarterly results, lengthy sales cycles for our products, development and maintenance of relationships with our service partners, competitive pressures, product development and rapid technological change, attracting and retaining key employees, risks associated with international operations, dependence on intellectual property rights, possible changes in government regulations, dependence on the continued development and maintenance of the Internet, security issues, litigation and the costs thereof.
Open Market, Catalog Centre, Content Centre, Content Server, Integration Centre, Marketing Studio, Personalization Centre, Satellite Server, ShopSite, Transact, and FutureTense are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Market, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
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