Chordiant Announces a New Model for Customer Collaboration and Innovation(email this article)

CUPERTINO, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Sep 10, 2003 -- Chordiant Software (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies), Inc. (NasdaqNM:CHRD - News) today announced the Chordiant Customer Collaboration Program, offering customers and partners the means to collaborate and co-develop business processes and application components. This is a new and innovative approach to providing the unique functionality required for both vertical and customer specific applications. This announcement is a milestone in the evolution of the software industry with Chordiant showing leadership in leveraging its technology advantages for orchestrating business processes in an open development - deployment software environment. Chordiant will present the "Chordiant Customer Collaboration Program" at the upcoming Chordiant Customer Symposium scheduled for October 14th through 15th in Dublin, Ireland.

The Chordiant Customer Collaboration Program provides a strategic set of advantages for customers and partners on how and where value is created. These advantages allow the implementation of their unique business processes for maximum differentiation and business fit. Strategically, this allows customers time-to-market, change management and competitive advantages. Operational savings may be realized from lowering the cost of development, deployment, support and maintenance for customer and industry applications throughout the solution cycle. Cost improvements are also a result of lowering the risk of historically large enterprise deployments and improving the businesses' ability to manage and change business processes and applications.

The Chordiant Customer Collaboration Program provides customers a complete Solution Lifecycle for the deployment, management and support of customer and industry specific components. This model has evolved over the past few years driven by customer input and a desire to have available a more open means of collaboration among partners and customers in the development of value-add components. The System unifies the four recently announced Chordiant solutions; Chordiant 5 Tools; the Chordiant Harmony delivery methodology; and the Chordiant Solution Lifecycle with the Chordiant Customer Network providing the communications forum.

This is a radically different approach to the development and deployment of enterprise software. Typically, enterprise software has been developed by hard-coding business processes, business policies and other functionality into compiled software applications. This has led to a 'closed' environment where expensive customization of the application is required by IT to meet current and ongoing business needs.

"Hard coded, out of the box, applications have typically failed to deliver on their promise - the amount of customization needed is brutal," said Stephen Kelly, CEO and President, Chordiant Software. "The belief in so- called 'out of the box' applications is a costly misconception since it implies that the application closely fits the business purpose. With services oriented organizations, each business is unique and a one-size- fits-all approach is inappropriate. As a result, significant amounts of customization are required by customers to get the 'out of the box' application to fit the customer's business."

This situation adds ongoing costs to customers, with many projects failing to deliver the expected benefits on time and to budget. There are hidden marginal costs as a result of out of the box applications failing to deliver the return on investment that was presented in the original business proposition. Having to make costly changes to internal custom- built applications also creates ongoing expense in the support and maintenance of these solutions. Furthermore, there is the opportunity cost associated with the time taken to make changes to these applications. This may result in lost business as a consequence of the inability to modify and change quickly the supporting stand-alone processes and applications as needed. This has effectively prevented many forward-thinking companies from being able to adapt as rapidly as needed to changing market forces - their application heritage acts as an inhibitor of change.

A different approach to the development of applications is urgently required to resolve this problem. For the last six years, Chordiant has pioneered the development of a standards based, component or service oriented, architecture. This has been made possible by the emergence of N- tier computing, component oriented environments (such as J2EE) and associated industry standards (XML, SOAP and Web Services). This offers levels of scalability and performance which has resulted in Chordiant under- pinning some of the world's leading financial services institutions. Applications can now be assembled from loosely integrated components rather than having all the logic hard-coded as part of a monolithic and inflexible product.

Changing the process of deploying new applications from custom coding to component assembly allows for significantly reduced effort and resulting development costs. This enables organizations to change and adapt individual elements of their applications without having to re-engineer and recompile the entire application. This also allows for the incremental exposure of legacy applications as services as well as the significant re- use of the components across different applications. This approach drives down total cost for the first deployment of an application, and reduces ongoing cost of ownership with every incident of 're-use' and change, while mitigating the risk of large-scale custom re-engineering.

With the introduction of the Chordiant Customer Collaboration Program, Chordiant is offering customers not only a very different model for application deployment, management and support, but also a much more open environment for customers to collaborate and enable rapid business change. At the heart of the Chordiant 5 solution is a complete business process management system, which puts control of process change in the hands of the business user as well as IT. By modifying application components and orchestrating these services, processes can be created or altered to support the required changes in the business. These capabilities enable changes in the business to be implemented within a matter of days rather than months and maintained as part of a complete Solution Lifecycle.

Chordiant believes these capabilities will give its customers an opportunity to further leverage their existing investments and use these leading capabilities to provide unparalleled business flexibility, adaptability and agility. The company intends to present this approach and the complete System with its customers and partners over the weeks ahead, while details of the formal program for strategic co-development and collaboration are expected to be unveiled at the Chordiant Customer Conference in Dublin, October 14th-15th, 2003.

About Chordiant Software, Inc.

Chordiant (NasdaqNM:CHRD - News) solutions automate and manage operational business processes for leading service-driven global organizations in retail finance, telecommunications and consumer direct industries.

Chordiant orchestrates the unique processes of an organization from the point of customer interaction, through the front and back offices to multiple transactional systems, corporate applications and data stores. Our solutions integrate existing infrastructure to orchestrate the assembly, enhancement and delivery of optimal role based business processes to the appropriate channels. Business value is realized through improved employee productivity, savings in operational costs, and increased business adaptability.

Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Chordiant maintains offices in Boston; Chicago; Mahwah, N.J.; Manchester, N.H.; New York City; London; Paris; Amsterdam; and Munich.

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