From: Chad Hill/Len Fernandes                                William Tseng
      Hill Communications                                    Confluent, Inc.
      510-945-7910 or 510-538-8916                           415-764-1000

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (July 1, 1995) -- Confluent, Inc., developer of Visual Thought, a UNIX flowcharting and diagramming tool, today announced its newest release, Visual Thought 1.2 for SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX.

Visual Thought moves ideas onto the screen quickly by making it easy for the user to drag-and-drop shapes and make rubberbanding connections between objects. The tool is used by engineers, software developers, and technical professionals to draw flowcharts, software diagrams, process and block diagrams, network diagrams, organizational charts, circuit and logic diagrams, and even World Wide Web graphics.

Uses Include Software Design, ISO 9000, TQM

Visual Thought has attracted a following among engineers who use the flowcharting capability and standard flowchart shapes to draw charts supporting TQM and ISO 9000 documentation efforts.

"Visual Thought is seeing particular demand from UNIX-based organizations certified as ISO 9000-compliant, quite possibly because it is the only flowcharting tool available on UNIX with rubberbanding connections and the full range of flowcharting shapes," said Mark O'Leavey, VP of Business Development at Confluent.

Software developers have also embraced Visual Thought for its ability to rapidly create software design diagrams using object-oriented methodologies such as Booch, Rumbaugh, and Entity-Relationship, as well as mixed and custom methodologies. Finance and telecom developers engaging in mission-critical projects have found Visual Thought especially useful for rapid prototyping of software designs because of its emphasis on fast diagramming and its low cost relative to typical CASE tools.

Optimized Diagramming, Integration with FrameMaker

Visual Thought is fully optimized for drawing diagrams, with features such as 100 levels of undo, a library of 81 shapes arrayed in drag-and-drop palettes, rubberbanding connections, and "live" WYSIWYG, showing users exactly what they're doing, even while dragging objects.

EPS and GIF file export capabilities allow Visual Thought to transfer diagrams to document processors like FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect, or to World Wide Web pages.

Visual Thought 1.1 is available now for SunOS and Solaris. Version 1.2 for Sun and HP-UX will ship in August. System requirements are 16MB of RAM and 32MB of swap space.

Suggested retail is $1295 for a floating license and $695 for a node-locked license, with academic and quantity discounts available.

Confluent can be reached at 415-586-8700 or 800-780-2838. Email to info@confluent.com or point your Web browser at http://www.confluent.com.

Confluent, Inc. * 400 Spear Street, Suite 207 * San Francisco, CA 94105
800-780-2838 and 415-764-1000 tel * 415-764-1008 fax * info@confluent.com

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