News Release Silent Partner Software Announces Professional Needs Analysis Consulting and Reporting Tool Lincroft, New Jersey, June 5, 1997 - Silent Partner Software Inc. has developed a software tool that converts the presales technical qualification effort into a consultative, revenue-generating opportunity. Its tool consists of a report generator and a series of knowledge bases. The knowledge bases enable IT service providers to collect a great deal of information about a particular customer. The customer information is fed into the report generator to develop a comprehensive, professional-quality needs analysis. The report may be passed to senior technical staff within the vendor organization to generate a system design or proposal or the end-user organization may use the report as the basis for a request for proposal (RFP). The tool is designed so that sales or junior technical personnel can collect basic technical information, allowing valuable senior technical personnel to be devoted to more strategic or billable activities. A knowledge base can collect requirements for a remote access or telecommuting needs assessment and generates both text- or table-based reports. The company anticipates developing additional knowledge bases to address other systems needs assessments in the near future, and is also focused on custom development. Trial demo software and sample reports can be downloaded from Silent Partner's Web site (www.phormion.com). Ellen Carney, DataQuest analyst, noted: "As service providers face shrinking margins, tools such as Silent Partner's needs' analysis software capture the interest of many service providers -- especially as they attempt to differentiate themselves by adding more value with the same quantity of human resources. Not only does the tool allow vendors to optimize the allocation of their scarce technical resources, but it allows even those without deep pockets or proposal production staffs to present professional needs' analysis documents to their customers." Carney added: "There is one sure way to own the business -- determine the need for the customer, fill that need, and make it easy for them to pick you. Silent Partner is pitching the software as a way to get paid for something the provider may already be doing for free. However, in the long term, it is more likely to open the door for consulting revenue as the customer evaluation and procurement process continues. Dataquest believes that an interesting addition to the tool's functionality would be to add capabilities to automate the RFP creation process. Silent Partner appears to have made it easy for resellers and integrators to do just that." About Silent Partner Software Silent Partner Software develops interactive sales and marketing tools that use Return-On-Investment (ROI) analyses to help high tech sales organizations explain their value propositions - and justify their price points - to their prospects. Silent Partner tools allow sales organizations to easily and clearly show their prospects how they can save money, time, and/or increase revenue using their products and services. We pride ourselves in transforming financial analyses into coherent, concise, value propositions and sales stories, and delivering the interactive tools sales organizations need to communicate them. Silent Partner's clients include IBM, HP, Network Associates, Intermec and Informix. For more information, please contact us at (908) 876-8700 or visit us on the web at www.phormion.com.