eFORCE “HIGH PERFORMANCE eBUSINESS ARCHITECTURE” MEETS QUALITY OF SERVICE AND RETURN ON INVESTMENT DEMANDS OF ENTERPRISE eBUSINESS APPLICATIONS

New Specialized Practice Focuses on Increasing Performance and Scalability of Production eBusiness Systems within Framework of Proven eBRIDGE™ Rapid Deployment Methodology

HAYWARD, Calif., April 25, 2001 – eFORCE, Inc., a full service eBusiness solutions provider with offices throughout North America and Europe, has launched a new High Performance Architecture (HPA™) practice to meet the performance goals of enterprise eBusiness applications and enterprise integration infrastructures.

HPA focuses on two types of client requirements: 1) increased performance of production eBusiness systems based on BEA Weblogic™, ATG Dynamo™, IBM Websphere™, iPlanet Application Server™ and their related environments — Sun Solaris, Oracle database — and enterprise application integration technology from webMethods, MQ Series and Tibco, among others, and 2) capacity planning, analysis and design of the system architecture to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.

“eFORCE is an ideal partner for CLAIMPlace because of their world-class expertise in the research, design and implementation of high-performance, scalable enterprise software,” said Ellen Wilcox, chief executive officer, CLAIMPlace. “By scaling in both integration cost and quality of service, CLAIMPlace is building equity volume as a claims processing exchange, while able to offer each individual customer a unique application service value.” Headquartered in Wilmington, Mass., CLAIMPlace has created the insurance industry’s first eMarketplace that offers insurance carriers access to best-of-breed claims handling tools to significantly reduce claim processing expenses and losses.

The HPA practice has “Best Practice” specialties such as n-tier capacity planning, rapid QoS assessments, “extreme” performance tuning of Java Application Servers; middleware and database tiers; diagnosis and stabilization of “at-risk” systems; and the measurement and instrumentation of production system “redlines.” The value to customers is directly linked to the deployment of enterprise eBusiness systems that meet optimal reliability, performance and scalability goals.

HPA practice delivery has already been deployed throughout eFORCE’s global Centers of Excellence, training and application development laboratories that contain state-of-the-art infrastructure to support rapid project initiation and quality deliverables. HPA supports the deployment in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific of sophisticated eBusiness systems based on leading technology.

"In order to achieve true business value from IT investments, systems must perform to expectations for reliability, scalability, and performance. eFORCE's recently launched HPA practice proactively addresses these needs and complements eFORCE's established business process and integration competency," said Stephanie Torto, senior analyst, Solution Integration Strategies, at leading industry research firm IDC. IDC has identified eFORCE as one of the "Top Solution Integrators of the 21st Century."

eFORCE’s HPA practice has helped clients in the manufacturing, transportation, energy, and financial industries realize significantly larger QoS capacity of their mission critical eBusiness deployments. Examples include eCargoService (www.ecargoservice.com), CLAIMPlace (www.hartford.com), as well as Avaya and Alstom Power. HPA clients have achieved measurable performance improvements of their mission critical eBusiness applications including up to 600 percent increases of load capacity, decreased average response times of up to 40 seconds, and a mean time to failure increase in one example from 3 hours to 4,800 hours.

HPA is the Quality of Service methodology of the company’s practice-wide eBRIDGE™ (eBusiness Rapid Implementation and Deployment for Global Enterprises) methodology. eBRIDGE integrates the power of HPA to rapidly deploy industrial-strength eBusiness solutions that meet the rigorous reliability, performance and scalability requirements of the most demanding Global 1000 clients.

“HPA is unique in being able to offer QoS architecture design that is derived directly from our client’s business goals and then deterministically implement performance, scalability and reliability to achieve the client’s expected ROI,” said Bruce Cottman, chief technology officer at eFORCE. “In appraising the outstanding results we have achieved for our clients around dramatically enhancing performance and scalability in the most demanding production environments, it has become apparent that we have significant intellectual capital — methodology and expertise that supports the critical needs of our Global 1000 clients.”

###