TradeStone Software's Solutions for Design, Sourcing, Quality and Order Management Gain IBM Retail Integration Framework Status

Business Wire, April 8, 2008

LAS VEGAS -- TradeStone Software, the retail industry's leading provider of private label and global sourcing solutions, today announced the company's Merchandise Lifecycle Management solutions have completed testing on IBM's Retail Integration Framework. TradeStone is partnering with IBM to unify design, sourcing, quality and order management to enable retailers to have more items on store shelves that sell through at full price. The Retail Integration Framework allows users to develop reusable components, provide best practices, promote standards, and accelerate solution deployments by making the overall buying process more efficient though the benefits of out of box integration.

IBM's Retail Integration Framework leverages open standards including Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), Open Application Group Integration (OAGIS) and Global Standards (GS1) to unlock communications between services, information sources, and business processes, making the store and the retail enterprise one seamless landscape rather than disconnected islands.

The IBM Retail Integration Framework initiative brings together platform-independent software vendors that deliver proven solutions designed and built for the retail industry. Through this initiative, IBM works with select IBM Business Partners to test solutions and ensure that they meet a rigorous assessment of next-generation, open-standards-based store environments.

"We are honored to be the first software company IBM has tested to connect retailers to one of the largest supplier catalogs in the world, offering a dynamic new approach to collaborative trading between retailers and suppliers," said Brian Marsden, President, TradeStone Software. "This validation also speaks to the great success of our partnership with IBM, and compliments the Best of Breed standards we both adhere to. We look forward to working with them further to continue to bring our industry expertise and award-winning solutions to the retail market."

About TradeStone Software, Inc.

TradeStone provides merchandise lifecycle management software that enables the world's most successful retailers to bring innovative and highly profitable private label products to market at record speeds. TradeStone's Merchandise Lifecycle Management(TM) suite, which consists of TradeStone PLM for Retail (TM), TradeStone Global Sourcing (TM), TradeStone Quality Management (TM) and TradeStone Global Order Management (TM), delivers radical results - 200 to 400 basis points to the bottom line; sales increases of 35 percent; average consumer spend increases of seven percent; and sell through at margins of 78 percent. TradeStone marquee customers include American Eagle Outfitters, Boots, Circuit City, Deutsche Woolworth, Guitar Center, Kohl's, Macy's, Novi Footwear, NBrown Catalog Company, Pacific Sunwear, Regatta and The Children's Place. TradeStone Software is headquartered in Gloucester, Mass., with offices in Atlanta, Bangalore, Hong Kong and London and can be found on the Web at www.TradeStoneSoftware.com. For more information on IBM Retail solutions, please visit www.ibm.com/retail.