Confirmit Delivered 99.979% Up-time on Hosted ASP Environments in 2005; Confirmit's ASP...

NEW YORK -- FIRM (OSE:FIRM), the world's leading provider of software for Market Research (MR) and Enterprise Insight Management (EIM), today announced a weighted respondent uptime of 99.979% for their US and European hosted ASP environments in 2005. In addition to this industry leading performance,

"These numbers are clear indicators that our ongoing and increasing investment in the hosted ASP environments has lead to greater security, stability, scalability and reliability for our clients. FIRM's past year of high growth and the definite trend of businesses and MR agencies standardizing on the Confirmit platform also justify our committed investment in the ASP environments. Continuing to set and reach increased service levels and provide exemplary performance for our clients through a dedicated Managed Hosting environment are successes FIRM is proud of and goals we are committed to maintaining," said Arnt Feruglio, Chief Operating Officer of FIRM.

So, what does 99.979% up-time for survey respondents mean?

"For FIRM's corporate clients this level of service and up-time means that their customers and other important stakeholders are able to share their opinions at the time of their choosing without interruptions diluting the customer experience. This stability ensures that our clients and partners receive business critical insight on time," explained Kjell Oksendal, FIRM's VP of Marketing. "And for FIRM's clients in the Market Research industry, these stellar service levels enable maximized utilization of their samples, reducing costs and allowing respondents to complete surveys at their convenience."

FIRM's Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees customers 99.7% uptime for survey respondents, which translates to an average of no more than 132 minutes per month of unplanned downtime. Downtime in excess of the SLA is compensated with extra days of service. Additionally, the ASP environments are Safe Harbor compliant, which is important for businesses that survey European residents where the EU Data Protection Act is a critical factor.

Confirmit's hosted ASP environments located in Dallas, Texas in US and in London, UK, are one of two offerings for the software license; Confirmit can also be licensed as a server install. In 2005, the total number of completed survey responses on the Confirmit platform, both ASP and on client-hosted servers was 60 million.

FIRM launched the first Confirmit ASP in 1999, and has made investments in its hosted service since that time. FIRM partners with Rackspace for a highly sophisticated Managed Hosting solution (not to be confused with traditional Co-Location), thus adding a substantial increase to the overhead cost of the environment. At the same time, this partnership provides a significant increase in the critical elements needed for a successful Application Service Provider (ASP) with regards to security, stability, scalability and reliability: 24/7 availability of specialists, 24/7 on site support, hardware replacements on site, Microsoft Gold Certification, leading SAN data storage, SAS 70 Type II certification, and more.

About FIRM

Future Information Research Management (FIRM) is the world's leading provider of software for Market Research (MR) and Enterprise Insight Management (EIM). The company's state of the art web-based survey software, Confirmit, is used for a wide array of market research surveys as well as customer satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction surveys. Results from these studies are instantly made available for key decision makers through Confirmit's integral report platform, Reportal.

Confirmit is used by some of the largest market research agencies in the world, in addition to Global 1000 companies. Customers include Accenture, AC Nielsen, British Airways, Crown Castle, Dow Jones, Egg, Greenfield Online, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Mori, The NPD Group, Progressive Insurance and Symantec.

FIRM is headquartered in Oslo and has offices in London, New York and San Francisco. In addition, Confirmit is distributed through partner resellers in Amsterdam, Sydney and Tokyo.

For further information regarding FIRM and Confirmit, please see www.confirmit.com.