SoftSmiths Ships e-Merchant and e-Wheel 4.0

Houston, TX. – April 25, 2002 – SoftSmiths, Inc. today announced the availability of the 4.0 release of its e-Merchant and e-Wheel e-Business application suites. Reflecting SoftSmiths' proven domain, industry, and technology expertise, 4.0 provides market-leading depth and breadth of functionality in Power and Gas management -- from deal capture to settlement -- resulting in faster deployments, dramatic increase of end-user capability, and rapid return on investment. SoftSmiths delivers critical e-Business solutions and services that enable energy industry participants to enhance profitability and reliability in the competitive marketplace.

"Ensuring our customers' success is SoftSmiths' primary objective. Their feedback and needs drove the 4.0 development, and today we are proud to announce that we have again set the standard for the Energy e-Business applications market," said Nathan Sheik, Chief Executive Officer of SoftSmiths. "4.0 delivers an impressive set of new and enhanced features and capabilities, but more importantly, ensures good return on investment for our customers by addressing critical factors such as applicability to energy business functions, solid technology and system architecture, and low total cost of ownership."

e-Merchant and e-Wheel are integrated suites of comprehensive, best-in-class applications representing the next generation in transaction management systems. They incorporate the best practices of trading, scheduling, contract, risk measurement and after-the-fact management, and are engineered for out-of-the-box accelerated deployment. 4.0 has been significantly enhanced to include new mission-critical tools and functionality that help market participants grow revenues more quickly, predictably, and profitably.

The e-Merchant and e-Wheel suites offer the flexibility to cope with ongoing changes in the marketplace, and support changing business practices for a variety of customers, from Generation and Transmission owners to Municipal Utilities, Load Serving Entities, and Power Marketers. The suites provide solid-core functionality to support common business practices, combined with extremely adaptable and flexible capabilities to support diverse business practices driven by regional differences, complex contractual relationships, and other specialized requirements.

SoftSmiths' e-Merchant product suite allows Purchasing/Selling entities to meet the increasingly demanding and complex requirements of their front office real-time scheduling activities. Using SoftSmiths' e-Merchant applications, real-time traders can avoid entering information multiple times, as is common with legacy systems, thereby dramatically increasing their efficiencies and opportunities.

e-Merchant and e-Wheel applications use a “Subscribe and Publish” architecture in a multi-tiered client server environment to allow users to request information and receive updates dynamically as that information is changed. This ensures that the information displayed on the user workstation is always up-to-date, while minimizing redundant requests for information and thereby preserving server, workstation, and network resources.

The e-Merchant and e-Wheel suites provide end-to-end solutions, delivering operational visibility across the enterprise to support information sharing and improved decision making. This helps companies optimize their processes and gain control of their operations, by providing consistent, in-depth, real-time access to critical business information. The query and drill-down capabilities leverage the information consolidated in the system, making it accessible to all authorized personnel and providing them answers in seconds instead of hours or days. At the same time, data consolidation aids in the management of operational risks, and greatly eases the increasingly important after-the-fact accounting and settlement tasks.

SoftSmiths' e-Merchant, e-Wheel, and ETPS product suites provide the critical elements for the next generation of transaction management systems. e-Merchant offers a flexible, scalable business technology solution, seamlessly integrating Trading, Portfolio Assessment, Resource Management, Scheduling, Risk Measurement, Accounting, and Reporting. e-Wheel is designed for RTOs, Transmission Providers, and Control Area Operators, and offers Scheduling, Transmission Services, ATC Management, Interchange Checkout, EMS Integration, Accounting, and Reporting. ETPS is a NERC 1.7-compliant Electronic Tagging solution allowing the electronic creation, verification, approval, and management of interchange transaction tags in all three roles -- agent, approval, and authority.

About SoftSmiths

SoftSmiths is a leading provider of proven business-critical Transaction Management Systems and services to the energy industry. SoftSmiths' seamlessly integrated and scalable products are designed to address increased customer and transaction volumes and yield increased operational efficiencies, thereby enabling its customers to profitably operate in the competitive marketplace. SoftSmiths' highly differentiated position in the market is a result of its in-depth knowledge of the industry’s business practices, having the broadest product development strategy and using its intellectual property and consulting service to meet its customers' competitive business requirements. The company has been successfully delivering e-Business solutions to energy service companies since 1997.

SoftSmiths is a registered trademark of SoftSmiths, Inc.

Contact Information:

Softsmiths Inc.
Hugo Stappers
Phone:    713.626.9184
Fax:          713.626.0186
Email:      mkt@softsmiths.com
Website:  www.softsmiths.com

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