Reuters Extends Greenhouse Fund With Four More US Investments

Business Wire, May 3, 1999

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 30, 1999--

Reuters, the global news and information group, has made four further investments in new technology companies: Aurigin Systems Inc, Northern Light Technology LLC, Persistence Software Inc. and Entegrity Inc. The investments are part of Reuters development `greenhouse' program, which invests in new technology and content companies and identifies new market opportunities for Reuters. All four companies are headquartered in the US and Reuters will have board representation on each of them.

Aurigin Systems provides software to navigate and manage complex intellectual property databases. Its markets are principally in the high technology, chemical, heavy manufacturing and pharmaceutical sectors. This minority investment complements Reuters acquisition on January 11, 1999 of VentureOne, which maintains a database of venture funded companies.

Northern Light provides a next generation search capability, a `research engine' for vertical market portals, offering a more effective Internet search capability for professional and business users. Northern Light's product includes a `pay per view' feature for high value content, supporting a business model that does not rely totally on advertising.

Persistence Software application servers accelerate transaction processing for both systems and end user applications. Its products are used in the financial markets and are likely to be increasingly used in high performance electronic commerce applications. Instinet, Reuters independently managed agency broker, is a customer of Persistence.

Entegrity is a provider of enterprise software to enable secure applications like corporate e-mail, and secure extranets. Reuters plans to develop information products which will incorporate this technology.

John Taysom, Reuters Director of New Business Development, commented: "These four companies meet our demanding investment criteria and will provide a number of synergies with our developing product range."

Notes to Editors

Reuters supplies the global financial markets and the news media with the widest range of information and news products including real-time financial data, collective investment data, numerical, textual, historical and graphical databases plus news, graphics, news video, and news pictures, reaching over 485,000 users in 57,900 locations. Reuters designs and installs enterprise-wide information management and risk management systems for the financial markets as well as providing equity and foreign exchange transaction systems. It extensively uses internet technologies for wider distribution of information and news. The Group employed 16,938 staff in 218 cities in 96 countries at December 31, 1998. Reuters is the world's largest news and television agency with 2,072 journalists, photographers and camera operators in 182 bureaus serving 157 countries. News is published in 22 languages. For more details see www.reuters.com/mediapack/background/greenhouse.htm

Reuters and the dotted and sphere logos are the trademarks of the Reuters Group of Companies.

Aurigin Systems - Founded in 1992, Aurigin Systems (formerly SmartPatents, Inc.) is the global leader in intellectual asset management (IAM) solutions. Aurigin systems are used by customers today in industries such as high tech and pharmaceutical, where quickly transforming ideas into revenue helps companies maximize their market value. Aurigin products enable customers to design long-term, profitable business and product strategies, by allowing companies to take stock of their intellectual property assets and relate them to business issues. Aurigin is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information, telephone 650.237.0900, visit www.aurigin.com or send email to info@aurigin.com.

Northern Light Technology (http://www.nlsearch.com) is the developer of the world's first and largest research engine. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company provides enterprises and individuals with access to highly relevant, quality information from a variety of sources. Northern Light's research engine intuitively combines the reach of a World Wide Web search engine with access to over 5,400 premium full-text sources previously unavailable, except to users of expensive commercial online services. Northern Light features exclusive classification and organisation technology so users more quickly find the information they need. Northern Light has a broad array of technologies and operating capabilities to enable Web-based information commerce. Northern Light Technology was founded by a seasoned management team of librarians, software engineers, and information professionals who recognised the need to fill the gap left by search engines and private research services. Northern Light introduced its research engine in August of 1997.

Persistence Software designs and develops transactional application servers, providing the foundation for distributed business processing. The Persistence PowerTier family includes PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and PowerTier for C . PowerTier reduces development time with container-managed persistent objects and optimises performance with shared transactional caching. Persistence couples standards-based products with technology transition services to assist customers in building data-intensive, distributed applications. Persistence products are in use today in more than 200 Global 1000 companies. Persistence was founded in 1991 in San Mateo, California and has its European headquarters in London. For more information see http://www.persistence.com.