Business Services Industry

Initiate Systems Unveils New CDI Software for Managing Organizational Hierarchies; Enables Complete, Global Customer Visibility

Business Wire, July 10, 2006

CHICAGO -- Initiate Systems, Inc., the leading provider of software for creating complete, real-time views of people, households and organizations, today announced new organizational hierarchy management capabilities for its market leading Initiate Identity Hub(TM) customer data integration (CDI) software. In related news, the company also announced today that Microsoft Corp. has deployed Initiate(TM) software for its Microsoft Individuals and Organizations (MIO) project to create an extremely accurate, high-performance transactional data hub that includes complete views of business-to-business (B2B) organizational hierarchies.

"Many organizations today are faced with non-integrated, conflicting views of business and individual relationships throughout their enterprise, and are seeking ways to understand and model these complex relationship networks. Until now, this was an extremely difficult challenge," said Bill Conroy, president and CEO, Initiate Systems. "Initiate Systems' new organizational hierarchy management capabilities, combined with our market-leading CDI software, help solve this global account management problem by providing the most accurate, scalable and easily deployed solution for companies that need to understand the true and total value of each customer relationship."

The new Initiate(TM) software creates complete, real-time views of organizational hierarchies from large amounts of customer data containing extremely complex relationships. This new capability enables complete, global customer visibility and account management by presenting consistent views and providing accurate information on all levels of a business relationship - such as partners, suppliers, distributors and resellers - between the business and its enterprise customers. Businesses gain new insights that help them in their efforts to increase revenues, enhance customer and partner satisfaction, comply with legal and privacy regulations and improve financial reporting capabilities.

"Hierarchy management is both a strategic and operational issue, even for companies that were early adopters of CRM and data warehousing technologies," says Jill Dyche, a partner with Baseline Consulting, and co-author of the new book, "Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth." "We find that the bigger the company, the more complicated the hierarchy management problem. Automating organizational hierarchy management can deliver near-immediate ROI."

The Initiate Identity Hub(TM) software organizational hierarchy management capabilities include:

--Recognizing, investigating and maintaining complex business relationships by identifying associated individuals within the context of their corporate structure or hierarchy

--Navigating complex hierarchies from individual to a full hierarchy view

--Classifying current business customer relationships according to a hierarchy maintained by externally trusted sources of business information

--Searching, retrieving, viewing and modifying hierarchical relationships and presenting this information to external users and applications

The Initiate Identity Hub(TM) organizational hierarchy management technology will be made generally available this fall. For more information, visit www.initiatesystems.com/products.> About Initiate Systems

Initiate Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of software for companies and government agencies that want to create the most complete, real-time views of people, households and organizations from data dispersed across multiple application systems and databases. Initiate Identity Hub(TM) software is more accurate, scalable, rapidly deployed and widely used than any other customer data integration and enterprise master person index solution. Many organizations in the financial services, government, healthcare, hospitality and retail sectors are using Initiate(TM) software to deliver the right data at the right time to all critical touch points. Initiate Systems' proven experience makes it uniquely qualified to enable strategic initiatives that allow organizations to increase revenue and efficiency and reduce operating costs and risks.

In-Q-Tel, a private venture group established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to deliver solutions to the CIA and the broader intelligence community, led Initiate Systems' recent Series E financing round, with participation by existing investors Sigma Partners and Apex Partners. Initiate Systems operates globally through its subsidiaries, with corporate headquarters in Chicago and offices across the U.S., a Canadian office in Toronto, an EMEA office in London and a Pacific Rim office in Sydney.