CHETEK, WISCONSIN - 10 September 1998 -- Aurora WDC, a Competitive Intelligence (CI) firm, has announced the release of the newest addition to its Recon suite of products, Informatica.Recon. Aurora WDC, with headquarters in Chetek, Wisconsin, and associate offices in Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, and Minneapolis, has positioned Informatica.Recon as an intranet module designed to harness the power of organizational knowledge and integrate information about competitors into the overall business process.

News of the product release comes as Managing Director, Arik R. Johnson, returns from the recent Frost & Sullivan Healthcare Competitive Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, California, where he won best-of-conference for his presentation, along with Madison-based software engineers Fuse Technologies, Inc., "Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence Applications on the Healthcare Intranet". "The intranet has become a recognized value-concentrator for organizations seeking to free up the knowledge and instinct held by their employees and databases and make it available enterprisewide. When firms apply intranet tools to specific business objectives and applications, like Competitive Intelligence, firms are better able to quantify bottomline results for management and impact competitiveness in the marketplace", said Johnson.

Aurora has been a leader in the field of Competitive Intelligence, or "CI", in the areas of customized research, training and consulting since 1994. Recent alliances with firms such as Fuse Technologies, who developed the core technology of the software application and will work with Aurora in deployment, have proved beneficial to the decision-making of client corporate executives when launching products or acquiring competitors. CI techniques also assist frontline personnel, such as salespeople trying to outsmart competitors in winning new customers.

"This represents a major shift in the mechanism of collection and distribution of CI in organizations, who have long used software and databases to manage and organize intelligence. With Informatica, anyone with a Web browser can integrate existing databases, file servers, newsfeeds, external Web sites, discussion and email, and other stored or explicit knowledge, with the expertise, experience, instinct and tacit knowledge of their employees. And organizations can identify experts based on who contributed to those storage repositories or who has accessed particular documents."

The important advances in software applications development in the late-90's has revolved around Internet related technologies, like the Web and Email and new internal software is often migrated to the corporate "intranet", or internal Web site. The big advantage of intranets are their basis in common or "open" standards, making management of corporate computing resources less troublesome. This means that anywhere an employee can access a Web browser, like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, they can also have access to all of the resources they get at their desk in a secure environment.

"We've taken the open standards of the Internet's World Wide Web, built a customizable search engine that uses natural-language query techniques that can index an entire global company and merged that with the process of CI to beat competitors in the marketplace. The central assumption is that 80 to 90 percent of the knowledge an organization needs to know about its competitors is already inside the company; then it's just a matter of figuring out where it is, who needs it and how they're going to get to it take action in the marketplace."

Some of Informatica's other key features are integration of regular email with the Web-based system, custom search "lexicons" that can enhance the results of search engine queries, and intelligent agents that can keep on searching for knowledge that hasn't appeared yet. Full details are available from Aurora's Web site - www.AuroraWDC.com.

About Aurora WDC

Aurora WDC is a leading global professional services firm specializing in Competitive Intelligence systems consulting, software, training and research services from its locations throughout the Midwest for clients in the financial services, healthcare, information technology, media and entertainment, telecommunications, transportation, retail/wholesale trade and manufacturing sectors. Aurora can be reached at 800.924.4249, via email at "recon@aurorawdc.com" or on the Web at www.AuroraWDC.com for further information.