Microsoft, Volante Form Alliance to Define Business Value For Straight Through Processing

NEW YORK, Feb. 3, 2004 — Volante Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced an alliance that will usher in a new era in message management, enabling financial institutions to define and transform critical business messages by implementing Volantes solution on the Microsoft®
.NET Platform. The strategic alliance between Microsofts Vertical Solutions Unit for Financial Services and Volante will focus on co-marketing, joint sales engagements and technology adoption for message management, enabling Straight Through Processing (STP).

Volantes product suite for STP accelerates data integration for the financial markets, delivering a new level of efficiency. Using an intuitive graphical designer, users can define message models or
“cartridges.” While the cartridge can be deployed on multiple platforms, the best performance and lowest cost is achieved by running it on Windows Server™ 2003 with the Microsoft .NET Framework, BizTalk® Server 2004 and SQL Server™
2000.

One of the challenges that Volantes model-driven solution solves is reducing the time it takes to STP-enable trading partners. Starting with the Volante Designer™
, developers or analysts build cartridges using a selection of prebuilt format components. These components define transformation, syntax and validation rules for widely used financial industry protocols. Code is then automatically generated, from the cartridge, for the targeted operating environment. Consequently, implementation time is reduced 60 percent to 90 percent compared with traditional methods of integration. This code is easily extensible via Web services.

“Volantes industry-specific integration technology has resulted in a unique solution to address the problem of achieving STP,”
said Kenny McBride, global industry manager for capital markets at Microsoft.
“In todays cost-constrained environment, Volantes solution on .NET delivers Microsoft economies of scale in an overhyped, underserved market.”

“Our market research indicated that servers running Windows® and Microsoft .NET are growing at a faster pace than any other platform in the financial services market,”
said Vijay Oddiraju, chairman and founder of Volante Technologies.
“This made it easy for us to decide to not only leverage Microsoft .NET but also the specific capabilities of Microsoft server products like SQL Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003.”

“STP solutions have critical security and availability needs, and Volantes ability to generate C# code running in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) on Windows Server 2003 provides enhanced security and reliability,”
said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Platform Strategy and Partner Group at Microsoft.

“In our internal and customer benchmarks, our cartridges always performed best by a significant margin on Windows Server 2003 when compared with other operating environments,”
said Krishna Sudarshan, chief technology officer at Volante Technologies.
“Whether the language is C#, C++ or even Java, in every case the Microsoft platform offered performance that was better by several orders of magnitude based on messages per second.”

Volante Designer is available today. Pricing is available upon request from Volante.

About Volante

Volante Technologies is an innovative business technology provider of Straight Through Processing solutions for the global financial services industry. Volante uses a Model Driven Integration approach to generate implementations and embodies the phrase
“the design is the implementation™ ”
. Founded in 2001, Volante Technologies Inc. is based in New York and California. For more information, please visit our Web site at http://www.volantetech.com/ or send mail to [email protected] .

About Microsoft in Financial Services

Microsoft is a leading provider of software products and technology to the financial services industry. Its customers operate in every area of retail banking, insurance and pensions, and the financial markets. Microsoft focuses on helping provide the security, scalability and reliability that the financial enterprise requires.

Working with leading software vendors and systems integrators in the banking, insurance and financial markets industries, Microsoft supports financial institutions in re-engineering core business operations, achieving STP, better managing all aspects of risk and capital adequacy, increasing efficiency in branch banking operations, and establishing a new generation of telephone and Internet-based financial services channels.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software any time, any place and on any device.

Microsoft, Windows Server, BizTalk and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ on Microsofts corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsofts Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.asp .

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