CONTACT INFORMATION

DQ Now
www.dqnow.com

NORTH ANDOVER, MA, April 9, 2002 – DQ Now is pleased to announce a new product, DQ Now, that dramatically reduces the time and effort required to improve data quality. The key to this productivity breakthrough: complete visibility. DQ Now's innovative tools provide a clear view of the data and an open window into the process of correcting problems and removing duplicates. DQ Now combines several unique features to profile, transform, cleanse, match and review data with an unmatched user experience. With 1/3 the required time investment and 1/3 the price of competitive products, DQ Now brings professional tools into the reach of more projects at more companies.

DQ Now can either be used as a complete data quality solution or as a companion to high-end cleansing products, dramatically reducing implementation time.

The company is actively seeking qualified beta sites to validate the product before release.

Market Need
Data quality is widely regarded as a key success factor for CRM, business intelligence, data warehousing and other major IT initiatives. Despite this tremendous need, existing data quality products have not been widely adopted. "The market has spoken," said Scott Lawton, President & CEO of DQ Now. "Only a small portion of data migration and data integration projects use current data quality solutions. I think the reasons are pretty simple: time and money. Current products require a major time investment and are too expensive for the typical project. DQ Now changes the value equation by a factor of 10: less than 1/3 the time and about 1/3 the price."

Product Components
Profile - DQ Now is the only data quality product that profiles data using domain knowledge (information about the correct structure and content for each field). Leveraging the full capabilities of DQ Now's cleansing engine, the Profile module summarizes known problems for quick review. Users can then focus on a separate report that shows only the exceptions which require attention. Organized as a hierarchy, the interactive report supports drill-down from the outermost summary through multiple levels all the way to individual records. Users have access to as much detail as required, without being buried in details that obscure rather than clarify.

Transform - The range of data quality problems is quite broad; no cleansing engine can address every error with built-in rules. DQ Now is the only data quality product with full support for regular expressions ("regex" or "grep"), a powerful method of text manipulation that is standard in many other fields.

Cleanse - DQ Now corrects data quality problems using embedded domain knowledge controlled by user-selected options.

Match - The first step in eliminating duplicates is to find records with a high degree of match. The most important step is to clearly communicate these results so that users can adjust the parameters to get results that fit their specific requirements. DQ Now includes numerous innovations that save the user time: it highlights character-level differences between fields, color codes the match level, clusters related subgroups, and shows the degree of match between each record and each subgroup.

Review - Effective cleansing is not simply a matter of buying a product and pushing a button. Users must understand what changes were made, so they can identify modifications that are not appropriate for the target application or that do not fit the company's business rules. DQ Now is the only product that shows every change to every field while keeping the entire record together. In the detail view, each change is labelled for full traceability, and the exact effects of the change are highlighted at the character level.

The second vital part of reviewing cleansed data is to look for problems that the cleansing engine and custom transformations missed. The solution is Profile (described above) -- thus closing the loop on the process of iterative refinement. DQ Now is the only product that provides effective support for the full process.

AvailabilitY
Due to ship later this year, DQ Now will include the components listed above for an expected retail price of $40,000. With DQ Now's Web-based interface, data analysts, end users, and management can access interactive reporting tools over the customer's intranet with no additional fees.

About DQ Now
DQ Now, a division of PreFab Software, Inc., was created to bring data quality solutions to more projects at more companies. Since 1993, PreFab has been delivering innovative solutions as products and professional services, improving company productivity and individual job satisfaction by simplifying and automating tasks and workflows. DQ Now and the DQ Now logo are trademarks of DQ Now.

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