Year 2000 Wire/ Relativity Technologies and Tier Technologies Solve Legacy-to-Web Problem With New Knowledge Mining Technology

Business Wire, Dec 7, 1998

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 1998--

Solution Enables Corporations to Identify, Analyze and Re-Use

Legacy Application Business Rules in New Initiatives;

Tier Technologies Provides Knowledge Mining Solution to Humana

Healthcare and Others in its Customer Base

Relativity Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of legacy transformation solutions, today announced its new, revolutionary Knowledge Mining technology for identifying and re-using critical business knowledge within legacy systems. Tier Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:TIER), a leading IT consulting firm and Relativity business partner, has adopted this new Relativity technology as the tool-of-choice for its Legacy Migration practice. The best practices of Tier's Knowledge Mining experiences have been incorporated into this latest Knowledge Mining release of Relativity's RescueWare tool.

"Corporations that we have dealt with have a strong desire to move their systems to the web and client/server," said Vivek Wadhwa, president and CEO of Relativity Technologies. "More often than not, they can't get to where they want to be because they are not quite sure where they are. The knowledge of how business transactions are processed is usually embedded in decades-old legacy systems. With great input from Tier and their experience at Humana, we have developed a technology that we believe will revolutionize the process of moving forward."

Tier, Relativity and Humana Healthcare

Using the Knowledge Mining approach, Tier has begun to replace a 750,000 line COBOL legacy system for Humana Healthcare with a new multi-tiered client/server application that re-uses hundreds of business rules that were identified and extracted from Humana's previous system, saving significant amounts of time and money.

"Tier's approach provides a springboard for the new functionality needed to support our new business model. The cost and time to deliver our new application is lower and less risky than other custom-built solutions. In fact, their price point is lower than the packaged software alternatives we considered," said Ben Stivers, Humana's IT manager of the selection process for the new client/server project. "We've been directly involved in the requirements for this product based on our experience with other tools. We are excited about the benefits that it offers and look forward to the new release."

"Increasingly, we find that our customers want to take advantage of the existing investment they've made in legacy systems when migrating to newer, leading edge technologies, " said Bill Barton, president and CTO of Tier. "The pairing of Relativity's Knowledge Mining technology with our consulting expertise offers clients the total solution they are looking for, and also provides an alternative to the build/buy scenario."

Legacy Market Issues

According to Steve Hendrick, vice president, Application Development Tools, International Data Corporation, "Companies must preserve the business rules that drive their organizations without interruption to ensure that their functional needs are continually met as re-engineering, new development, or maintenance activities occur. Knowledge Mining gives companies a head start in this arena by identifying these rules ahead of time."

The New Technology

The Knowledge Mining architecture is comprised of four integrated components designed to provide organizations with a concise understanding of their business rules and how those rules impact their business by:

-- providing an overall graphical diagram of the business processes

supported by an application

-- examining the hierarchical structure and inter-related

relationships within programs

-- extracting concise business rules from legacy programs across

entire legacy systems

-- generating system-wide documentation and reports that can be

published in HTML

The Knowledge Mining facility is an add-on product to Relativity's flagship offering, RescueWare - the industry's first software solution to fully integrate the process for transforming legacy systems to modern platforms - and is now available worldwide from Relativity.

About Tier Technologies

Tier Technologies provides information technology consulting, application development and software engineering services that facilitate the migration of clients' enterprise-wide systems and applications to leading edge technologies. Tier serves Fortune 1000 companies and government entities through its offices located in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. For additional information about Tier Technologies and our Knowledge Mining services, please visit Tier's web site at www.tier.com.

About Relativity Technologies, Inc.

Relativity Technologies' mission is to revolutionize the transformation of legacy software assets to efficient, productive computing environments through innovative software solutions. Relativity Technologies was founded in February 1997 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Relativity Technologies' RescueWare offers a fully integrated and graphical Windows-based solution that significantly reduces the time and cost involved in performing legacy transformation. RescueWare converts legacy COBOL applications to modern languages, such as Java, C , and Visual Basic. RescueWare also offers Year 2000 and European Monetary Union analysis and remediation as part of the transformation solution. For additional information about Relativity Technologies, please visit Relativity's web site at: www.relativity.com.