Item    6431274                 93/08/10        18:51
From:   CONRAD_GEIGER@NEXT.COM@INET#    Internet Gateway
Subject: WhiteLight Announces Business Modeling Software for NEXTSTEP

For more information, contact:

Norman Goldfarb
Whitelight
Palo Alto, CA
Email: norman@whitelight.com


WhiteLight Systems Announces WhiteLight/Engineer 1.1

"Object-oriented business modeling software for financial planning,
analysis and control"

PALO ALTO, CA, July 30, 1993 --- WhiteLight Systems, Inc. today
announced the release of WhiteLight/Engineer 1.1. Major new
functionality includes object linking, scripting, and savable
workspaces, as well as 71 other enhancements. Release 1.1 runs on
NeXT, Inc.'s NEXTSTEP operating environment for Intel and Motorola
processors.

WhiteLight/Engineer addresses a fundamental problem shared by every
large company: The complexity and dynamics of the business have
outgrown the ability of current technology to deliver instantly the
information that management needs to run the business.

WhiteLight/Engineer is the first software product that enables a
company's management and staff to build a shared model of the
business from a common library of business objects and their
computational relationships.

The resulting business model is clear and unambiguous. Because it
is as complex and dynamic as the business requires, the model is
ready to partition and deploy as the company's financial planning,
analysis and control applications. No matter how complex these
applications become, they maintain the flexibility and continuity
of the shared business model. This integration of business model
with applications is unique to WhiteLight/Engineer. As a result,
WhiteLight/Engineer customers achieve dramatic management and
application development efficiencies.

By reusing business objects, these applications enable users to
instantly access and manipulate the unique information they
require, in the format they require, while assuring information
accuracy, consistency and integrity throughout the organization.

Customers use WhiteLight/Engineer to build and operate applications
such as financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting, sales
forecasting, business planning, strategic planning, transfer
pricing and portfolio analysis. Fortune 500 customers are in the
telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, financial services, and
public accounting industries.

According to Ronald Weissman, director of corporate marketing for
NeXT, Inc., "WhiteLight/Engineer is a superb implementation of
object-oriented technology. It is the first tool that allows
managers to actually model and manage their business using objects
-- all without programming. Using objects to model your business is
what the object-oriented revolution is ultimately all about, and
WhiteLight offers a truly unique and compelling approach."

According to Chip Goodman, WhiteLight president, "Companies are
overwhelmed with data. But what they don't have is accurate,
specific and conclusive information at their fingertips. With
WhiteLight/Engineer, they get the information they need to run the
business when they want it, often in seconds."

"WhiteLight/Engineer is a fast and flexible reporting tool, but
what really excites me is being able to perform sophisticated
decision support analysis right in the application. End-users never
before have been able to answer `what if' and goal-seeking
questions with such a complete model of the business. A
7-dimensional business model might incorporate multiple
allocations, eliminations, currency translation adjustments,
non-linear functions and simultaneous equations," continued Mr.
Goodman.

WhiteLight supplies seven libraries of 1200 "intelligent business
objects" that are common to many businesses, in categories such as
finance, organization, region, time, and currency. These objects
are intelligent in that they "know" how they computationally relate
to other objects. For example, "1993" knows that it is the sum of
"January" through "December". "Shareholders' Equity" knows that it
is "Assets" minus "Liabilities". Customers easily customize these
libraries and add other libraries specific to their business, such
as product and customer lists.

Users create applications by mixing and matching objects from their
libraries. They use a "point and click" methodology; there is no
procedural code (e.g., macros) in WhiteLight/Engineer. Further,
because objects know how they computationally relate to other
objects, applications mostly build themselves. Creating reports is
similarly straightforward, since the "Income Statement" object
knows which financial objects to present.

Small end-user/developer teams design and deploy fully-operational
applications, tailored to business requirements, within weeks of
licensing the software. By reusing common business objects,
end-users handle many of their own maintenance updates and generate
their own reports, in minutes. End-users can also build small
applications in days.

WhiteLight/Engineer builds on NEXTSTEP's object-oriented
environment. Business users realize the power of object-oriented
programming without becoming programmers. The software hides
powerful but arcane object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation,
inheritance and polymorphism under a graphical interface that
speaks the language of the business user. Combined with
WhiteLight's libraries of business objects, the result is a
development and user environment that is exceptionally productive.

WhiteLight/Engineer applications are not like other applications.
First, they are extremely flexible because users can add, modify
and delete business objects at will. Second, they handle complexity
with ease, because the complexity problem is delegated to the
business objects. Third, they provide clear and unambiguous
information because the values, sources and uses of every business
object are always available in the users' own terminology.

 "The benefits accelerate when you start adapting and reusing
entire applications across the business. Simply by swapping a few
business objects, you can re-engineer an application for a new use
or a new set of users. For example, by swapping "budget" for
"actual", you can begin to turn a financial reporting application
into a budgeting application. By swapping months for years, you can
also turn it into a strategic planning application," said Mr.
Goodman.


"We can build a prototype application from a company's data in one
day. We just need their data, samples of their reports, and two
hours of their time. The prototype will include their numbers,
their account names, and their business structures. It will include
up to 50,000 values, of which 80% may be calculated," said Mr.
Goodman.

"One customer built a complete budget system for their
international business sector in six weeks. They tell us that, for
the first time, they can understand the multi-dimensional impact of
their decisions. A consolidation and reporting process that took
six people eight weeks last year, one person did in four days this
year," Mr. Goodman continued.


"Customers often use WhiteLight/Engineer to replace large-scale
spreadsheet applications. Spreadsheets are versatile personal
productivity tools, but impractical at scale. Large-scale
spreadsheet applications are inefficient, illogical, prone to
error, expensive to maintain, dangerous to build on, and prone to
collapse under stress," said Mr. Goodman. "Customers also replace
budgeting, consolidation and other packaged applications that do
not have WhiteLight/Engineer's ability to keep up with the
customer's always changing requirements for immediate, accurate and
specific information."

According to the Patricia Seybold Group, "It is clear that using
objects to model your business is a concept whose time has come...
Of fundamental importance is business process redesign,
collaboration and the need for a shared vocabulary about the
business... Companies are increasingly taking advantage of the
ability of object-oriented development approaches to make complex
relationships available to all applications... They ask the very
basic questions that... make their own business practices and
assumptions explicit so they can reexamine those assumptions."

WhiteLight Systems, Inc. is a privately-held software company
headquartered in Palo Alto, California.


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