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Amman, January 21, 2003: Estarta Solutions, a leading provider of IT solutions and Microsoft, Estartas investor completed a joint project to support Laiki Bank, a leading bank in Cyprus. Both partners, Estarta and Microsoft successfully implemented a solution to establish a middleware infrastructure utilizing existing resources rather than more costly alternatives.
The integration of BizTalk 2000, an open standard, with native XML support and seamless interoperability with several platforms gives Laiki Bank an extensible system that can be further developed by internal resources, thus minimizing the cost of any future integration.

Publishing of well-defined XML interface schemas will enable the different departments of the bank to utilize pre-developed services this improving code reuse and minimizing development, deployment and maintenance cost," says Ennis Rimawi, Chairman and President of Estarta. The total cost of solution provided is one third of any other customer reviewed alternative solutions on the market today" adds Rimawi.

The need for integrating the different systems in the bank and the timeliness of such integration efforts has taken its toll on the banks resources. The solutions provided by Microsoft products, Services and Estarta have shown a tremendous boost to time-to-market. BizTalk has given the bank the ability to establish a middleware infrastructure whereby they can build it once and plug in many with minimal effort. In just 3 weeks Estarta and Microsoft were able to meet a deadline.

After 3 weeks of effort by Microsoft and Estarta, the pilot implemented has met all of its objectives. We are very satisfied with Microsoft products, BizTalk 2002, as a messaging middleware for Laiki Bank. With BizTalk we were able to implement the agreed upon business process integration. In these 3 weeks, Microsoft Services and products enabled us to achieve this critical Enterprise Application Integration with minimal investment," says Andreas Papageorgiou, Head of Application Infrastructure, Laiki Group.

I personally thank all those involved for the great work they have done and the commitment they have shown…, with your efforts, you have shown that MS and Estarta are partners that we can count on," says Andreas Chrysafis, Manager Network & Infrastructure Services, Information, Laiki Group.

It is great to hear customer testimonials appreciating Microsoft Technologies, Microsoft Partners, and Microsoft Services, delivered and orchestrated by a great team, focused on bringing business value to our customers", adds Charbel Fakhoury, Regional Country Manager, Microsoft.

For further information on Estarta, please contact:

Faten Assaf , Estarta Solutions, Amman, Jordan
Tel: (962-6) 533 0751 or Fax: (962-6) 533 0752 or email: fatena@estartasolutions.com,
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