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Excelergy
www.excelergy.com

CAMBRIDGE, MA., December 14, 1999 - Excelergy Corporation, an e-technology leader for the deregulated energy industry, today announced a new utility industry standard by successfully demonstrating that its billing, customer information and trading partner management software can easily support up to10 million utility customers. This number is well in excess of any number previously reported in scalability tests for the deregulated energy market.

“The need to scale, successfully manage millions of customer accounts, and most importantly, to do so on such an affordable server is very significant when meeting the challenges of energy deregulation," said Gene Zimon, Chief Information Officer of Boston Gas, a subsidiary of Eastern Enterprises. “We viewed this benchmarking process scalability assessment as critical to our deployment of the system. These are impressive results for any industry.” Mr. Zimon was awarded the 1999 James H. McGraw Award for IT Excellence in September, 1999.

Excelergy's software running on IBM Netfinity (Intel Pentium- based server products product) allows energy service companies and local distribution companies to accommodate their growing energy businesses by providing solutions that are scalable to millions of customers online on a readily available server.

Collaborative Consulting validated the scalability test at IBM’s Netfinity Teraplex Integration Center in Raleigh, N.C.North Carolina The test utilized eleven 11 Netfinity Pentium four-way SMP processors running in parallel with the Oracle 7.3.4 DBMS and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 to process over half a terabyte (500,000,000,000 ,000,000,000 Gigabytes) of data —10 million customer accounts containing a year’s history of information — in under ten10 hours. All hardware and software used in the tests is commercially available. Customer accounts and customer data equates to1.1 billion rows of data. Seven realistic electronic business transactions (EBT), such as accessing and updating customer information were run simultaneously. The online test supported 1,000 concurrent users with a sub-second average response times transaction rate.

“Technology must be robust enough to Handle large and complex customer transactions while being readily affordable for new entrants into the market,” said Guerry Waters, vice president, Energy Information Strategies, META Group. “Both scalability and reasonably priced applications are critical components to the success of deregulated energy companies."

"These sophisticated tests prove that the Netfinity server and Excelergy’s core software technology are providing the utility industry with tremendous horsepower for its dollar,” said John Callies, vice president, marketing, Netfinity. “It's critical for companies to prove the success of their business intelligence solutions before implementation and the IBM Teraplex is a real world environment for large-scale dress rehearsals.”

The accelerating pace of deregulation is driving demand for next generation technologies that will better equip energy retailers to compete for customers who now can choose their energy providers. These new technologies are critical in cost-effectively managing these new customer relationships and in providing increasingly higher levels of customer service.

“This type of world-class scalability shows that Microsoft Windows NT Server can handle the most demanding high-volume utility applications,” said Scott Fawcett, global energy and process manufacturing industry manager at Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased to see utility software vendors such as Excelergy utilize the Windows platform this way and in such a dynamic environment.”

Based on open industry standards for EBT, including eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Excelergy’s advanced billing platform, ABP 3000, and electronic information transaction system, eXACT, leverage component-based, N-tier, open architecture that enables a successful customer relationship strategy.

About IBM:
The IBM’s Netfinity Teraplex Center allows companies to stress-test hardware and software to identify and resolve scalability and functionality issues in a controlled environment before business intelligence systems go live. It features a 32-node Netfinity cluster with 8.7 terabytes of storage capable of supporting the most demanding business intelligence applications. Netfinity servers are armor-plated with advanced technologies such as Light Path Diagnostics and “Chipkill” memory adopted from IBM’s big iron heritage. Since 1998, Netfinity servers have set over 42 performance records including seven number-one benchmarks. Information on the Netfinity X-Architecture and performance information can be found at www.pc.ibm.com/us/techlink/srvperf.html.

The IBM Teraplex Integration Centers are open to Customers and business partners for no charge and are equipped for testing of applications and products from multiple IBM divisions and from non-IBM vendors. The S/390 and RS/6000 Teraplex Centers are located in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., AS/400 Teraplex is in Rochester, Minn., the Netfinity Teraplex is in Raleigh, N.C. and the recently opened NUMA-Q Teraplex is in Beaverton, Oregon.

About Collaborative Consulting LLC
Collaborative Consulting LLC, based in Woburn, Mass., specializes in performance engineering and assessment services for large-scale distributed applications.

About Excelergy:
Excelergy is the deregulating energy marketplace’s leading provider of Web-based customer information and transaction management technology. From developing innovative billing software platforms to publishing the retail energy industry’s first XML standards to Offering e-ChoiceNet, an auction site for retail energy procurement, Excelergy is giving energy companies a competitive advantage in the New Energy Economy.* Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Excelergy has offices in Atlanta, GA and Santa Monica, CA and over 100 employees. More information is available at www.excelergy.com.

New Energy Economy
Emerging from the nationwide deregulation of the electricity and gas industries, the deregulated retail energy market is estimated to be more than $300 billion in the U.S. alone by 2005. This energy economy is spawning new technologies, new companies and increased competition for customers who will soon be able toshop online for their gas and electricity. Central to the New Energy Economy is the critical need for knowledge and information management systems and tools dedicated toderegulation.

Note: IBM, NUMA-Q, S/390, RS/6000, AS/400, and Netfinity are registered trademarks or trademarks of International Business Machines Corp or its wholly owned subsidiaries. Microsoft, Windows NT and BackOffice are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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