Sterling Commerce Cited as Leader in Order Management Evaluation by Independent Research Firm

Business Wire, April 21, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Sterling Shows the Strength of its Multi-Enterprise Collaboration Offerings with Market Leading Web Services Enabled and SOA Compliant Distribution Order Management Solution

Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, announced today it was cited as a leader in the inaugural Forrester Wave(TM) Report: Order Hubs, Q2 2006(1), released this week. The Sterling Distributed Order Management solution (DOM) received top honors as an "order hub" for its ability to deliver the right balance between business process expertise and order hub infrastructure.

The report's authors state, "As enterprises seek unified solutions, Order Hubs emerge to manage the OMC (order management cycle) to support a multitude of inbound order channels, address flexibility in the presentation of information across various user roles, manage complex OMC business processes, provide a flexible core application foundation, and adopt next generation architecture and infrastructure."

"In the report, Forrester highlights the need for process-centric views and the maturation of middleware platforms in changing customers' requirements for order management," said Eric Meerschaert, VP of Global Marketing for Sterling Commerce. "As a pioneer in the distributed order management market, we pride ourselves on helping our customers stay ahead of their competition by delivering solutions that dramatically reduce the costs and improve service in spite of today's complex, global, interconnected processes. That is the vision of multi-enterprise collaboration."

The Forrester report continued, "Sterling Commerce / Yantra pioneered the distributed order management market. The solution continues that vision into the OMC with a strong product strategy and Order Hub infrastructure. Leading inbound order channel support includes partners and cooperative buying groups. The solution delivers not only a robust presentation framework, but also strong event and state management, order brokering, and business process management tools in its core application foundation. Moreover, the solution is fully Web services enabled and SOA compliant."

About Sterling Distributed Order Management (DOM)

DOM offers leading business process support for order capture to fulfillment, routing and tracking, demand planning, order processing and scheduling, and distribution and logistics processes across large-scale, complex dynamic environments. Built on a service-oriented architecture with complex, process-centric modeling capabilities, DOM interoperates with existing legacy applications and can easily work with information owned by other applications. DOM creates a single unified view of the fulfillment process across divisions, yet is highly flexible to enable unique processes at each division. Unique in this market, Sterling Commerce supports both single-instance and seamless, hosted multi-client deployments, improving DOM customer satisfaction through greater deployment options.

About Sterling Commerce

Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), has more than 30 years of leadership and expertise in extending processes beyond the edge of the enterprise to enable visible business with suppliers, customers, partners and employees. With more than 29,000 customers worldwide, the company is one of the world's largest providers of multi-enterprise collaboration solutions. Sterling Commerce builds collaborative, multi-enterprise communities for customers in the retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications industries. For detailed, up-to-date information about Sterling Commerce and its solutions, visit www.sterlingcommerce.com.

The Forrester Wave is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc.

(1) The Forrester Wave: Order Hubs, Q2 2006, by "Ray" Wang with John Ragsdale and Ian Schuler, April 2006.