Union Investment Chooses E-Business Platform BusinessWare From Vitria Technology

Business Wire, March 12, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

FRANKFURT, Germany & SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 12, 2001

Union Investment Gesellschaft mbH, one of Germany's largest investment companies, has chosen the BusinessWare enterprise application integration solution from Vitria Technology, a leading provider of e-business platforms. Union Investment is establishing a flexible IT infrastructure that quickly and economically integrates new and old IT systems automatically and across several locations.

Until now, the exchange of data between the different IT systems of Union Investment offices in Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Zurich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, Budapest and Warsaw was handled by a custom interface program. However, this solution lacked the flexibility to accommodate reorganizations and changes in software components. For this reason Union Investment (www.union-investment.de) -- one of Germany's largest investment companies, with total assets of more than DM 100 billion -- has chosen Vitria Technology's BusinessWare e-business platform.

Within this framework, BusinessWare serves as the starting point for the integration of software for margin calculation as well as securities management and fund bookkeeping systems with the existing IT infrastructure. In addition to the integration of data and applications, BusinessWare Automator also integrates these at the business process level. The most important business processes within the company along with processes conducted with institutional (B2B) partners and end customers (B2C) are graphically modeled and automated. The location-independent automation of business processes enables users to control the flow of information according to the actual business conditions and forward it to the appropriate IT systems via BusinessWare.

Plans foresee the use of BusinessWare throughout the company; the software will ensure availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week without exception. BusinessWare runs on four Sun E10000 servers linked together into HA (high availability) clusters. Within each HA cluster, two servers are linked together to ensure failsafe operation. If one of the clusters goes down, the other can immediately take over its workload.

Vitria partner Entory AG (www.entory.de) in Karlsbad/Karlsruhe, Germany, known for solutions covering the entire e-finance life cycle, supported Union Investment evaluating and implementing BusinessWare.

"We've chosen Vitria's BusinessWare because Vitria provides software for data integration, business process management, and real-time analysis with a unified architecture," explained Axel Erhardt, project manager at Union Investment in Frankfurt/Main. "Furthermore, the e-business platform BusinessWare offers excellent performance in handling high volumes of data with scalability and reliability."

"Finance is strategically an extremely important area of the economy," added Martin Schroder, managing director Central Europe at Vitria Technology. "Particularly in this sector, effective e-business concepts are of increasing importance. The fact that an important company like Union Investment has chosen Vitria is a testament to the good work we're accomplishing with BusinessWare."

About Vitria

Vitria Technology, Inc. is a leading integration server provider. Vitria's ebusiness platform, BusinessWare, integrates applications and automates mission-critical business processes within and across the extended enterprise, reducing time to market, shortening lead times, lowering operating costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. Vitria is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq:VITR) based in Sunnyvale. For more information, call 408/212-2700, visit the company's Web site at www.vitria.com or send email to info@vitria.com.