AmberPoint Customer H&R Block Financial Advisors Honored with InfoWorld 100 Award; Financial Services Leader Recognized for AmberPoint-Managed SOA System

Business Wire, Nov 15, 2005

OAKLAND, Calif. -- AmberPoint congratulates its customer, H&R Block Financial Advisors, for its recognition by InfoWorld magazine as a winner of the InfoWorld 100 Awards. The award honors real-world IT projects that use technology in innovative ways to meet business and technical objectives. H&R Block Financial Advisors was commended for its services-based lead-routing system, which uses AmberPoint runtime governance software to ensure operational health and maximize business value.

"IT departments continue to learn hard lessons about business realities and realistic ROI," said Eric Knorr, executive editor at large. "The InfoWorld 100 provides a forum for IT managers to get the recognition they deserve for smart projects from an audience of their peers."

The annual award honors IT projects that demonstrate the most creative use of cutting-edge technologies to further their business goals. Nominations were submitted by InfoWorld readers, technology partners, and end-user companies in late-summer. To be considered, projects must stretch beyond the typical, off-the-shelf solution, using multiple technologies in innovative ways to serve well-defined business goals. Winners were formally announced in the November 14, 2005, edition of InfoWorld and are available online at: http://infoworld.com/3573.> "AmberPoint is an essential component of our SOA infrastructure," said Scott Thompson, head of application development at H&R Block Financial Advisors. "Without the control and insight into the system provided by AmberPoint, we wouldn't have been able to achieve our production goals for SOA-based applications."

H&R Block Financial Advisors is one of North America's largest broker/dealers. Last year, the company implemented a services-based system to qualify and route leads from its tax organization to its financial advisors. With the capabilities provided by AmberPoint, H&R Block has realized the following benefits:

--Comprehensive service level management

--Rapid exception diagnosis and shorter mean-time-to-resolution

--Uniform exception governance across SOA

--Ability to easily identify areas that need refinement

--Lower cost of application development and production support

"Congratulations to H&R Block Financial Advisors for their recognition as an IT leader," said John Hubinger, CEO of AmberPoint. "Many AmberPoint customers are like H&R Block Financial Advisors in that they are ahead of the curve at gaining real business value from SOA. The InfoWorld 100 award validates our ability to meet demanding customer requirements and to help leading organizations achieve a sustainable return on their investments in loosely coupled systems."

About AmberPoint

AmberPoint is the industry's leading provider of SOA visibility, management and security solutions. Customers such as British Telecommunications, H&R Block, Motorola and the U.S. Department of Defense have chosen AmberPoint for its comprehensive capabilities, its non-invasive approach and its native support for Java and .NET. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or info@amberpoint.com, or visit www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.