Marketmax and Spotlight Solutions Form Strategic Alliance To Offer Retailers Improved Sales and Profitability

The Combined Technologies Integrate Merchandise Planning with Pricing and Revenue Optimization

Marketmax and Spotlight Solutions today announced a strategic alliance that will enhance both companies offerings to major retailers and their suppliers. Under the alliance, the companies have integrated pre-season and in-season planning with forecasting and markdown optimization, allowing joint customers to more accurately plan and manage merchandise assortments based on changing market conditions. By combining their respective technologies, Marketmax and Spotlight have created a formidable alliance, enabling customers to effectively improve sales and profitability.

Marketmax is the leading provider of advanced retail planning, analytics and optimization software for many of the worlds most respected retailers and their suppliers. Spotlight Solutions is the leading provider of business optimization software for retailers and apparel manufacturers. The combined solution synchronizes pricing strategies with merchandise planning in a Web-based, scalable and flexible environment. Customers are able to maximize inventory investment decisions to fine tune allocation and increase turns, yielding immediate ROI. In addition, retailers acquire the functionality to more efficiently evaluate merchandise performance, resulting in fewer markdowns and improved gross margins.

Together, Marketmax and Spotlight Solutions are creating unprecedented value across retailers merchandising systems, delivering the capability to develop carefully orchestrated, optimized plans that boost revenue," commented Lori Schafer, Marketmax president and CEO. Spotlights pricing optimization technology makes it an ideal complement to our pre-season and in-season management solution and rounds out our alliance strategy. We look forward to working together to bring real bottom line value to our customers."

We are pleased to join forces with Marketmax. Their planning expertise perfectly complements Spotlights demand optimization expertise, said Jim Kelly, Jr., Spotlight CEO. With this alliance, retailers and their suppliers will be able to feed demand information from Spotlight into the planning process, thus optimizing merchandising decisions."

About Marketmax
Marketmax, based in Wakefield, Mass., is the leading provider of advanced retail planning, analytics and optimization software to the worlds premier retailers and their suppliers, helping them to keep one step ahead of demand. Marketmax enables retailers and their suppliers to become more intimate with their stores, channels, products and customers to deliver measurable results in the form of increased margins and profitability, fewer markdowns, improved inventory turns and greater customer satisfaction. Marketmax is respected throughout the retail supply chain for its technology leadership in providing best in class" solutions and the industrys only truly integrated, web-architected and highly scalable enterprise planning and optimization software.

Marketmax customers include Amazon.com, Discovery Channel, Finish Line, Lowes Companies, Marks & Spencer, Office Depot, Pamida Stores, PDI/Kenneth Cole Menswear, Sainsburys Supermarkets, ShopKo Stores, The Spiegel Group, The Sports Authority, Staples, Waitrose Food Stores and Williams-Sonoma.

For more information, visit www.Marketmax.com or call our worldwide headquarters at 781-876-3200. For European sales information, Marketmax can be contacted at +44-1455 823800.

About Spotlight
Cincinnati-based Spotlight, a leader in Pricing and Revenue Optimization, has captured the attention of leading retailers, industry analysts, and the national business media, including the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and CNNfn.

Spotlight helps retailers and e-commerce companies and their suppliers more effectively price, promote, markdown, source, and allocate merchandise to match customer demand. Spotlights software solutions apply mathematical algorithms to sales, inventory data to recommend specific courses of action. Spotlights new approach optimizes, automates, and manages complex decision processes, enabling merchants to dramatically increase gross margins by squeezing more revenue out of existing merchandise. Spotlight serves a rapidly growing list of brand name retailers in their quest to improve gross margins. For more information visit http://www.spotlightsolutions.com or call 513.339.0777.

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Media Contacts:
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Jacki Elwell
Marketmax, Inc.
781.876.3249
jelwell@marketmax.com

Dan Dyer
Spotlight Solutions
513.229.3547
ddyer@spotlightsolutions.com

NOTE TO EDITORS: Marketmax is a registered trademark of Marketmax, Inc. Spotlight, Markdown Optimizer, Rapid Results and Software for Brighter Retail DecisionsSM are trademarks of Spotlight Solutions, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.