Torrent Systems and Fingerhut Named Finalists inIntelligent Enterprise Magazine's 1999...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 21, 1999--

Torrent Systems, Inc., announced today that it was named a finalist in Intelligence Enterprise magazine's prestigious RealWare Awards. The selection recognized the innovative and exceptional information technology (IT) solution built by

Fingerhut used Orchestrate to enable a mail stream optimization (MSO) program that would allow the company to process the massive amounts of data it needed to optimize customer selection over multiple catalogs rather than individual catalogs. With trillions of possible customer/catalog combinations, Fingerhut originally estimated that the system would take more than 20 days to complete processing--an unacceptable length of time for a company that mails more than one million catalogs every day. Using Orchestrate, Fingerhut was able to execute the MSO in parallel, cutting runtime to less than ten hours. As a result of the Orchestrate-enabled MSO, Fingerhut discovered methods for dramatically cutting its catalog distribution list without decreasing revenue. The company expects to see a multi-million dollar return on its investment this year.

This year's RealWare Awards had the largest response in terms of entries since the program started seven years ago. Judges focused on the use of software tools and algorithms to enable business users and analysts to make smarter decisions, learn about new business, supply chain, or market conditions as quickly as possible, and develop products and services based on a deeper knowledge of customers.

Allen Razdow, President of Torrent Systems, stated "Torrent is proud to be recognized as to be providing business value to customers like Fingerhut."

"Orchestrate was a critical piece of the MSO. Without Orchestrate, we could not have achieved our goal of optimizing our advertising efforts," said Fingerhut Group Manager for Corporate Research and Analysis Randy Erdahl. "As for future uses, we foresee other ways that we could reap benefits from this investment."

Winners will be announced August 3, 1999 at the Decision Processing '99 Conference produced by DCI and Database Associates, in San Jose, CA, as well as in "Intelligent Enterprise," and online at www.realwareawards.com.