Open Text and Seven to Deliver Brand Management Solution

Business Wire, Oct 15, 2001

Business Editors

CHICAGO & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 15, 2001

Seven to Showcase New Livelink-Based Solution for

Marketing Professionals at LiveLinkUp 2001,

Open Text's Upcoming User Conference

Open Text(TM) Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX)(TSE:OTC), a worldwide leader in delivering collaborative commerce solutions, and Seven Worldwide, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Graphics Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:AGD), today announced a strategic partnership designed to help businesses more effectively develop and manage their brand identities.

Seven, a leading provider of e-solutions for managing visual brand communications, will serve as an Open Text strategic solution partner, offering a Livelink(R)-based application, called Mediator-A Seven Solution(TM), via traditional licensing and as a subscription-based hosted service. Livelink is Open Text's collaborative commerce and knowledge management software platform.

"Open Text's partnership with Seven advances our strategy of introducing Livelink-based solutions tailored for specific business processes," said Bill Forquer, Open Text's senior vice president of business development. "With Seven's domain expertise, we are able to quickly bring to market a solution to help marketing professionals achieve greater efficiencies through tools that facilitate collaboration between marketing departments, their agencies and others involved in the brand development and management process."

Seven's Mediator application is designed specifically for managing the process of creating, reviewing and producing brand communications such as packaging, advertising, brochures and point-of-sale marketing material. Seven uses Mediator to produce solutions designed to help customers improve control over their brand images, achieve consistency across promotional mediums and international markets, reduce production lead times, and cut overall costs.

As a customized version of Open Text's Livelink, Mediator delivers a suite of media production tools, providing marketing professionals across all industries with access to a brand asset library, robust collaboration capabilities, powerful automated workflow and innovative project management features. Mediator customers cover a broad range of industry sectors, including consumer goods, advertising, transportation, and pharmaceutical.

Seven will demonstrate Mediator at its exhibit during Open Text's upcoming user conference, LiveLinkUp, in Las Vegas on November 5-9. In addition, David Foster-Lyons, marketing director of Seven, will present at LiveLinkUp on November 9, addressing the role collaborative knowledge management plays in helping organizations share knowledge across geographical borders, improve time to market, and reduce costs.

"With Livelink serving as the underlying platform, Mediator helps organize the work between corporate brand managers and their extended enterprise of graphic artists, creative agencies and writers," said David Foster-Lyons, marketing director of Seven. "Mediator's Livelink-based infrastructure is ideally suited as a hosted solution, enabling full Web functionality, as well as speedy, cost efficient deployment. Livelink is the most flexible, scalable and reliable platform for collaborative application development that we have found."

"Software vendors must adapt to customer demands for new, more flexible, licensing approaches if they are to survive," said Stephen Graham, vice president of global software partnering and alliances, IDC. "While many organizations still prefer the long-term planning horizon benefits normally associated with traditional perpetual licensing, acquiring software on a subscription basis offers a number of important benefits such as the ability to better meet cash flow requirements and the needs of project-based initiatives."

About Mediator

Mediator is a part of Seven's Visual Brand Communications Management services. Designed to provide an integrated suite of tools to marketing professionals in a diverse range of market sectors, Mediator delivers a brand asset repository, workflow management and project management capabilities.

About Livelink

Livelink is a highly collaborative commerce and knowledge management application. Its richly-featured enterprise services include virtual team collaboration, business process automation, enterprise group scheduling and information retrieval services, all tightly integrated into a solution that is easily customized and extended. Livelink is essential to the effective management and development of communities of interest that span organizations and industries. For everything from the creation of complex e-community relationships to the automation of simple e-business processes, Livelink delivers true dynamic collaboration between individuals, organizations and large trading communities. Livelink servers are fully Web-based and open-architected to ensure rapid deployment and easy access to its full functionality through a standard Web browser. For more information, visit www.opentext.com/livelink/.>