Vertical*i Announces Global Agreement with IBM

Joint Effort to Help Customers Better Manage Business Development Pipelines, Relationships and Alliances

NEW YORK, NY (PRWEB) July 26, 2003 - Vertical*i Inc. today announced a global agreement with IBM to jointly sell Vertical*is Web-based solutions, including Lead Evaluation Application (LEATM) and Partnership and Alliance Management (PAMTM). The Vertical*i offerings are designed to help customers better manage new business development pipelines, relationships and alliances.

Initial focus will be on the Life Sciences industry, where pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies rely extensively on industry collaborations to increase product pipeline and sales. Through the agreement, IBM will create consultancy services that support the LEA, PAM and future Vertical*i applications.

IBM services will include requirements definition, business case formulation, project management, change management, business process design and systems integration. Vertical*i will provide technical and training resources to IBM to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of the consultancy services.

"Pharmaceutical companies must immediately address the R&D model and the significant costs and delays associated with drug discovery and development," said Dr. Steve Arlington, Global Lead Partner, IBM Business Consulting Services Life Sciences / Pharma practice. "In order to prosper, pharmaceutical companies must improve the management of these processes, as well as management of their relationships and alliances. Our joint offerings with Vertical*i provide a significant step forward in addressing these key issues."

Vertical*i solutions are based on a robust and scalable relational model and provide integrated contact, project, document and workflow management systems, which are easily configurable to match each organizations unique collaborative business process and knowledge management needs.

For example, the LEA offering enables business development professionals to help improve licensing and acquisition decision-making and alliance management. The PAM solution complements the LEA offering and helps large organizations to achieve their objective of becoming the partner of choice".

In addition to co-selling LEA and PAM solutions, Vertical*i and IBM are in the process of defining a new software product that will offer real-time management of R&D project portfolios and resources.

This agreement with IBM offers Vertical*i a significant business opportunity and is a key milestone in our history," said Vertical*i CEO, Timothy OConnor. The relationship validates our business strategy and technology approach and confirms the market potential of open standards-based, rapidly developed, Web based, on demand solutions for commercial clients."

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About Vertical*i                      www.verticali.com

Vertical*i Inc. is a privately owned software company with operations in the USA, UK, Switzerland and Australia. Vertical*i has created the Vertical*i Application Platform (VAP) - a powerful J2EE compliant framework. Vertical*is products have been created on this framework or core architecture. It enables developers to rapidly create robust functionally rich enterprise-ready applications by modeling instead of coding.

The VAP, built on industry standards, works on all major platforms. Vertical*is clients include Fortune 500 companies. Vertical*i works with Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and distribution partners establishing the VAP as a mainstream framework upon which web-based collaborative applications can be rapidly built and customized to meet business needs.

Partners include IBM, Sun, Oracle and Jinfonet.
Vertical*is solution fills the gap between costly, enterprise-wide Corporate Performance Management (CPM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and low cost but functionally weak personal productivity tools.