Press Release - Epicor

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Epicor Announces New Suite of eBusiness Applications

Suite Demonstrates Epicor’s eCRM Strategy, Designed to Enable Companies to Build Closer Customer Relationships by Integrating Operations Across All Customer Touch Points

KONA, Hawaii, Perspectives ‘99 Conference, November 8, 1999 — At its annual international users conference, Epicor Software Corporation (NASDAQ: EPIC) today introduced and is demonstrating a pre-release version of its eBusiness suite, a set of applications that enable companies to manage and integrate front office, back office and eBusiness operations across all customer touch points. Epicor’s eBusiness suite delivers on the promises of e-enabled CRM, or eCRM, by building on Epicor’s success in providing integrated front and back office applications to provide a comprehensive Internet solution that is wrapped around the customer. eCRM enables companies to offer customer-centric and vendor-supported Internet services and transactions that automate processes from all parts of an enterprise, delivering self-service, storefront and supply chain benefits through the Internet.

Within the eBusiness suite, Epicor unveiled its Storefront, a new eCommerce application for managing business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions via the Web, Interactive CRM, which enables real-time communications between companies and customers over the Internet and a Customer Portal for integrating operations across all customer touch points.

The eBusiness suite further extends Epicor’s current Web capabilities – self-service across both front and back offices -- and brings powerful new eBusiness capabilities to a broader market of mid-sized companies that are increasingly adopting Web-based applications for managing customer relationships, back office functions and eBusiness operations in a single, integrated system.

“The ability to consolidate all customer touch points across the front office, back office and eBusiness operations is becoming a mandate for midmarket companies, especially as they realize that customers are only a click away from the next competitor,” said Mike Pennell, vice president of product marketing for Epicor. “Our new eBusiness suite will extend the value of our integrated architecture for not only managing back office transactions but creating a more holistic view of customer relationships, whether through traditional channels or via the Web.”

Pennell continued, “With this suite, Epicor sets a new benchmark for enabling midmarket companies to deploy eBusiness initiatives as an integrated part of their overall enterprise infrastructures. The eBusiness suite will support our front and back office applications, making them eBusiness ready and enabling companies to put their most critical asset -- customer relationships -- at the center of all their operations.”

Epicor Storefront Integrates eBusiness and Traditional Operations Many companies are struggling to integrate their eBusiness initiatives with their traditional operations in order to deliver consistent levels of customer service across different channels of interaction -- a critical factor affecting customer satisfaction. Customers who find themselves repeating information they’ve already submitted on-line or receiving conflicting information from different sources within a company are often the first to defect to another supplier. With Epicor’s new Storefront, companies will be able to interact seamlessly with customers via the Web, offering customers item catalogs, order entry and order status information capabilities. Future releases will include virtual product demonstrations and seminars as well as technical support and service.

By integrating with Epicor’s front and back office applications, the Storefront also provides companies with greater visibility into supply chain issues, order fulfillment, and other customer history information so that service representatives can interact with customers more effectively. For example a customer in the process of placing an on-line order may also speak with a sales representative who can help complete the order, answer questions, or suggest alternative -- or additional -- products. The software allows companies to maximize the value of each interaction with the customer to create an increasingly personalized experience that builds customer retention over time.

Epicor’s eCRM Strategy – Customer Portal and Interactive CRM Capitalizing on its integrated front and back office offerings, Epicor will provide a complete eBusiness solution that makes conducting business over the Internet more effective for midmarket enterprises. Rather than simply automating transactions over the Internet, Epicor’s eCRM strategy demonstrates the merging of eBusiness and CRM, providing a solution for the entire customer life cycle, from product research to purchase, from inquiry tracking to support.

The term eCRM is somewhat contradictory – while customer relationship management (CRM) promotes software applications and processes that enable sales, marketing and support departments to build long-lasting, profitable relationships with customers, the Internet enables customers to serve themselves without the assistance of a company’s sales, marketing or support departments.

eCRM represents the ability to help a company’s sales, marketing and support personnel better serve its eBusiness customers who are using the Internet. Back and front office customer-facing applications form the cornerstone of this strategy, as total integration of these applications is key to achieving eCRM. “Epicor is the only company that can demonstrate true eCRM capabilities for the midmarket today as we have the front office applications, including sales force automation and customer support, integrated with our back office applications including financials, distribution and manufacturing, all supporting an eBusiness suite” said Pennell.

Epicor’s new eBusiness suite will include a Customer Portal, which enables integration of operations across all customer touch points using one common user interface. The Customer Portal will provide a common method by which all of a customers’ interactions with its chosen partner can be done via the Internet.

The suite will also include Interactive CRM, which provides an interactive method for a company and its customers to communicate, real-time, over the Internet. Utilizing Interactive CRM, if a company’s customer has a question while placing an order over the Web, the customer can click a button on the Web page, which prompts a sales representative to call the customer immediately. The customer and sales representative can then simultaneously and interactively share that same Web page so that the customer’s questions are answered and the order is placed properly.

Epicor’s eBusiness Suite Epicor’s eBusiness suite of Web-enabled applications will integrate with the company’s front and back office applications, including Platinum ERA, Clientele, Vantage, Avanté and Platinum for Windows. With the suite, companies can enable business partners to place and track orders on-line, as well as allow suppliers to view purchasing requirements in real time. New Web-based decision support features will provide users with a single Web-based interface into front and back office information. Users can easily create HTML-based queries to analyze sales, inventory, customer information, and other data to generate operational reports in Excel and Web-based output.

Epicor’s eBusiness solution also enables companies to better leverage customer data stored in Epicor’s Clientele software, used by over 3,000 companies to manage front office operations. With the suite, field personnel can access customer relationship management (CRM) data to track and update the status of service calls, and sales representatives can view their customer pipelines and gather prospect information on-line. The eBusiness software also allows companies to build customer self-service applications such as viewing account information and submitting change-of-address notifications via the Web.

Epicor’s eBusiness Technology Epicor has incorporated a complete range of Microsoft products and tools in the development of its eBusiness suite, including Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition (Commerce Server). Future versions of eNet will also support Commerce Server and the Microsoft BizTalk framework. Other key Microsoft technologies to be used include Microsoft Visual InterDev, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ). The eBusiness suite continues to expand the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based schemas that are the core of the BizTalk framework.

Availability Epicor’s Storefront, both business-to-consumer and business-to-business, is scheduled for availability in the first quarter of 2000. The Interactive CRM and Customer Portal capabilities are scheduled to be available mid-2000.

About Epicor Software Corporation Epicor, the company formed following the merger of Platinum Software and DataWorks, is the largest enterprise software supplier focused exclusively on the real-world requirements of midmarket companies. Epicor delivers business performance solutions that enable companies to automate on their own terms and outperform their competition by capitalizing on customer relationships, minimizing the risks and upheaval of conventional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Founded in 1984, Epicor is ranked among the industry's ten largest enterprise business solutions providers by industry analysts, with more than 10,000 enterprise customers worldwide. Epicor is headquartered in Irvine, California and employs over 1,600 employees globally. More information about Epicor, its products and services is available at www.epicor.com.

Epicor is a trademark of Epicor Software Corporation and Clientele is a registered trademark of Epicor Software Corporation. Platinum is a registered trademark of PLATINUM technology International, Inc. The product and service offerings depicted in this document are produced by Epicor Software Corporation.

The foregoing statements regarding anticipated product releases including targeted release dates, feature functionality, integration with other products and the inclusion of certain third party technology are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially. The factors that could affect actual results include but are not limited to, unanticipated development delays, undetected software errors, difficulties in attracting and retaining skilled technical personnel, technical difficulties with third party products, difficulties integrating with other company products and other factors discussed in the Company’s Quarterly report on Form 10-Q, for the period ending June 30, 1999, at pages 13-18. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements.

Editorial Contact:
Vanessa J. Gaw
A&R Partners, Public Relations
650-298-3920
vgaw@arpartners.com

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