E-commerce: ICL Joins AT&T, Compaq, IBM, MessageQuest and Others to Develop Secure E-commerce Application - ICL's i500 Enterprise Directory - Product Information

EDGE, On & About AT&T, April 5, 1999

ICL Tuesday announced that its i500 Enterprise Directory has been selected as a core component of a new, secure electronic commerce application being developed for one of the world's leading oil companies. ICL has joined fellow BQM Forum partners AT&T, Compaq, MessageQuest, IBM and other technology suppliers to develop the application.

The Business Quality Messaging Forum will demonstrate the pilot of this application at EMA'99, opening today in Dallas, at the booths of AT&T and Compaq. The pilot demonstrates the successful integration of numerous off-the-shelf and emerging technologies including message queuing, message brokering, Internet services, directory services and security.

The application is being developed in response to a business case raised by a major oil company for a secure electronic system to notify the company's 2000-plus distributors of daily product pricing changes, providing each with a unique price. The system will replace an insecure and inefficient manual fax notification procedure.

Roger Mizumori, technical director, Messaging and Collaboration Solutions for Compaq Computer Corp., said, "ICL's enterprise-class i500 directory makes an excellent solution for this application. The critical business process need for speed and consistent access are met by i500's responsiveness and high availability."

BQM Forum Chairman Mark B. Smith, a member of JK&B Capital, said, "ICL's i500 directory is a key enabling component of the BQM secure e-commerce pilot. Given i500's multi-platform support, ICL will likely be chosen for several BQM e-commerce deployments over the next few years."

ICL's i500 directory server holds information about the company's distributors, including their product, pricing, and preferred information delivery method. Distributors can elect to receive information via email, pager, fax, short message service (cell phone page) or direct computer-to-computer communication. Distributors can also choose to access information through a standard Web browser.

The application reliably transmits pricing changes electronically, validating distributors' security certificates utilizing a major bank's security infrastructure, and confirming the receipt of the pricing notifications back to the oil company.

ICL's i500 Enterprise Directory is high-capacity directory software designed for large, diverse organizations. The directory integrates seamlessly with off-the-shelf software. Supporting both LDAP version 3 and X.500 standards, i500 is ideally suited for both general- and special-purpose directory applications, such as PKIs, VPNs and Business Quality Messaging.

According to The Radicati Group, ICL's directory ranks first in market share among integrated LDAP/X.500 directory servers.

The BQM Forum, founded in April 1997, facilitates and expedites the development of reliable, off-the-shelf business applications. The BQM Forum serves as a neutral organization for vendors and end-users to address issues related to the deployment of transactional messaging within volume applications. BQM Forum is on the Web at: www.bqm.org

ICL is a leading supplier of IT systems and services. Operating in over 70 countries and employing over 19,000 people, the Group's revenues for 1997 were (pound)2,477.1 million (US$4,136.8) generating a pre-tax profit of (pound)30.0 million. The company implements IT systems for major projects and provides innovative services to a range of industries covering, among others, retail, finance, travel, telecoms and utilities together with education, local and central government sectors. ICL services include outsourcing, helpdesks, network services, inter/intranets, electronic commerce solutions, interactive kiosks, smart card systems, digital cities and Web sites. ICL plans to list on the London stock market in 2000.

ICL is the developer of the i500 Enterprise Directory Server. In the United States i500 sales and support have headquarters in Reston, Virginia 20191; phone 703/648-3300, fax 703/648-3350. More information on i500 is available on the Web at www.i500.com. ICL's corporate Web site: www.icl.com.

Exchange rate for restating ICL's revenues in US dollars: (pound) 1 = $1.67.