REDWOOD SHORES, CA – February 8, 1999 – Extricity™ Software, the leader in business-to-business integration, today announced support for Commerce XML (cXML), an open standard for business-to-business e-commerce that facilitates the exchange of catalog and transaction information between buyers and suppliers. Developed by a group of over 50 leading companies including Extricity, cXML is a suite of lightweight, end-to-end protocols that allow trading partners to exchange catalog content and transaction management information securely across the Internet. Extricity has announced integration with its industry-leading Alliance™ application and cXML. Extricity and Ariba will begin pilot implementations using cXML over the Internet in Q2 1999.

Extricity’s Alliance business-to-business integration application leverages XML and incorporates its strengths into a comprehensive business application environment – managing all critical aspects of integrating and automating interactions between customers, partners and suppliers. cXML extends Extricity’s leverage of the W3C-approved XML standard by enhancing the secure electronic management of catalog and transaction information across corporate boundaries. cXML also allows suppliers to provide customers with targeted, one-to-one catalog content and supports supplier-centric, buyer-centric and out-sourced content management.

"Extricity is dedicated to providing process-level coordination among business partners through its Alliance application suite," said Greg Olsen, CTO of Extricity Software. "Commonly understood definitions of business information, such as those provided by cXML, allow partners to more rapidly deploy solutions in Alliance and to focus more energy on process improvements in order management, inventory management and other procurement activities". In Alliance, users can construct, execute and manage processes that coordinate the exchange of cXML-based objects (as well as other XML objects) among partners and the integration of this information with the business applications like Ariba that each partner uses.

Extricity Alliance’s support for cXML extends its openness and complements Extricity’s existing support of other business-to-business integration standards, such as VICS Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) and standards efforts led by groups such as CommerceNet, RosettaNet, the Open Applications Group (OAG) and the Semiconductor Manufacturing Data eXchange (SMDX).

"Competing in today’s business environment means being able to rapidly assemble communities of customers and suppliers – big and small – in a way that allows them to function and compete as a single world-class corporation," said Monty Botkin, GM of North American Operations for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). "Extricity’s Alliance software allowed TSMC to integrate and automate ordering, forecasting, design and manufacturing processes with our customers and partners – enhancing customer service and retention and reducing product lead times by up to 40%."

"We are very pleased that Extricity Software has chosen to support the cXML standard," added Keith Krach, President and CEO of Ariba Technologies. "Through the ongoing support of cXML and other XML standards, Ariba and Extricity can further enhance the capabilities of trading partners wishing to share mission critical business processes over the Internet, enabling those partners to create extended enterprises which span entire value chains."

The Development of cXML: a Truly Collaborative Process

cXML was created through a market-driven, collaborative effort of industry and technology companies. The standard was developed with input from more than 50 organizations, including leading e-commerce companies such as Ariba, Extricity Software, InterWorld Corporation, Ironside Technologies, Poet Software, Saqqara Systems and Sterling Commerce. Contributing companies included 1Nine Systems, Anderson Unicom Group, barnesandnoble.com, BT Office Products International, CAP (a division of the McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group), Chemdex Corporation, Collabria, Compucom, ComputerLiteracy.com, Cort Furniture Rental, Harbinger Corporation, Life Technologies, NCR Systemedia Group, Office Depot, RoweCom, Staples and US Technologies. This diverse base of participants has worked to ensure that a robust, scalable cXML specification is being delivered to the marketplace.

About Extricity Software

Extricity Software is acknowledged as the leading provider of business-to-business integration applications. Recently identified by Fortune Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Enterprise Software Companies to Watch" (12/7/98) and included in InformationWeek’s "Most Important Products of ‘98" (12/14/98), Extricity Software was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Redwood Shores, CA.

Extricity’s patent-pending suite of application software, Extricity Alliance, enables companies to aggressively improve both competitiveness and profitability. Extricity leverages the Internet and emerging software technologies such as XML to automate shared business interactions throughout entire value chains of companies – including customers, suppliers, distributors, contract manufacturers and third-party logistics providers – that comprise today’s extended enterprise. On the front-end, Extricity Alliance creates and manages mission-critical collaborative business processes such as vendor managed inventory, collaborative planning and engineering, channel assembly and much more. On the back end, Alliance breaks down the barriers of diversity by integrating disparate enterprise applications that often exist between businesses.

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