Sterling Commerce Positioned in the 'Leader' Quadrant for the B2B Gateway Providers Magic Quadrant in First Quarter 2006

Business Wire, Feb 28, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) subsidiary, announced today it was positioned in the "Leader" quadrant of Gartner's Business-to-Business (B2B) Gateway Providers 1Q06 Magic Quadrant(1). This placement follows on the announcement that Sterling Commerce is positioned in the "Leader" quadrant for the Gartner Integration Service Providers Magic Quadrant in the First Quarter 2006 on Jan. 19, 2006.(2)

According to Gartner, "Vendors in the leaders quadrant are most likely to have high revenue and commitment to this market, high market share and installed bases, and products that are of interest to a large audience. Additionally, the leaders in this space have presented domain expertise and compelling messages that have penetrated the market (intentionally or unintentionally)."

"B2B gateways continue to be in high demand from organizations of every size, regardless of industry expertise," said the report's authors. "Vendors have expanded the functionality of the B2B gateway from primarily providing a means of consolidating and centralizing a company's B2B communications, regardless of the size and type of data, to providing some internal integration (resulting in the eventual externalization of the integrated data) and providing an infrastructure for service interactions between partners."

"The evolution of the B2B Gateways market ties directly to our product strengths and vision for multi-enterprise collaboration," said Sam Starr, president and chief executive officer for Sterling Commerce. "We believe being positioned in the 'Leader' quadrant in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for B2B Gateways confirms our commitment to helping customers integrate, manage and enhance their interactions with their customers, vendors, and partners, inside and outside the four walls of their organization."

Multi-enterprise collaboration helps companies eliminate collaboration barriers to improve interactions with their suppliers, customers, partners and stakeholders. Sterling Commerce enables multi-enterprise collaboration through its extensive B2B integration capabilities in its Gentran Integration Suite. Built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), Gentran Integration Suite provides a single, process-centric, standards-based platform that facilitates business processes between back-end systems and a company's extended enterprise of globally-distributed sets of business partners.

By offering comprehensive B2B capabilities, including trading partner management, secure communications, integration, translation, web services, business process management, managed file transfer and business activity monitoring, Gentran Integration Suite enables organizations to reduce IT complexity, manage business partners effectively, and gain end-to-end visibility across their extended enterprise. Gentran Integration Suite provides the flexibility to deliver a cost-effective solution that enables fast and highly robust compliance with open business standards and Internet/legacy protocols, such as AS2, Rosettanet and ebXML, and a strategic platform on which to progressively build out the full range of multi-enterprise integration, business process management and B2B capabilities required by customers over time.

Sterling Commerce will be hosting an interactive B2B integration forum with Frank Kenney, principal research analyst at Gartner. Registration for this event can be done through email: best_practices@stercomm.com.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2006, by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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.