Xtract Attains Principal Partner Status In The Sun Partner

November 12, 2007; 05:53 AM
Helsinki, Finland and London, UK, 12 November 2007 – Xtract announced today that it is a Principal Partner in the Sun(SM) Partner Advantage Program, for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Xtract qualified for this level by meeting Sun's stringent criteria for excellence as a supplier of community marketing intelligence solutions, and by committing to tight strategic and technical alignment with Sun.

By achieving Principal Partner status, Xtract joins the growing community of ISVs that are developing applications for or porting applications to the Sun platform. The benefits to Sun customers include access to a broader range of pre-tested, optimized solutions; investment protection and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) through collaborative engineering between Sun and its partners; and a higher level of predictability and support as Sun rolls out its latest technologies and software upgrades.

Sun and Xtract will cooperate to offer a comprehensive solution for advanced community marketing intelligence. This is based on Java technology and works hand in hand with Sun’s solutions such as DW20 and DW40 targeted for clients requiring massive data management. Marketing departments at mobile operators, retail, media and online companies will benefit from this partnership as it offers them a complete solution and a short time to market.

‘At Sun, we thrive through innovation and therefore we are thrilled to partner with Xtract, an innovator in the new area of community marketing intelligence. Our joint solution brings a unique and complete proposition for mobile and online community marketing. Making marketing more effective - engaging and relevant – means our customers are able to take better care of their customers and increase their market share,” says Waleed Hamza, Sun’s Partner Sales Director for Central & North Europe.

“In today’s networked world, companies are looking for new ways of making their business more competitive,” says Kimmo Kiviluoto, CEO of Xtract. “Xtract has come up with a composition that understands and learns from rich communication data while protecting customers’ privacy through a new breed of analytics’ solution. Marketing campaigns, segmentation and targeting can become much more efficient that way. With Sun’s long competence and leadership in network computing infrastructure, we are able to offer a complete solution to our mutual customers.”

In addition to a full-scale implementation, Xtract’s solution will also be offered as a hosted service. This is a very lucrative proposition for those customers who don’t want to dedicate the time or the resources to invest on an in-house solution.

About the Sun Partner Advantage Program

Introduced in September, 2005, the Sun Partner Advantage Program, for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), is designed to make it easier for ISVs to get the resources they need to go to market faster on the Solaris 10 OS, link with Sun's Marketing, extend their sales reach, harness the expertise and connections of Sun's partner ecosystem, and help grow their business.

The Program helps create an increased level of collaboration among Sun and its ecosystem of technology partners. By participating in the Sun Partner Advantage Program, ISVs receive simplified, programmatic, Web-based access to the resources they need to help them succeed in each stage of the application life cycle: design, development, deployment, and operation.

For complete details about the individual offerings that are available, go to www.sun.com/partners/isv.

About Xtract

Xtract is the trusted partner in community marketing intelligence. Our core strengths are in social network analytics and process optimization. We help mobile operators, online and media companies to deliver efficient marketing by predicting customer behavior - giving meaning and life to raw customer data. Xtract enables marketing departments to leverage and deliver on the potential of their brand assets, by understanding their customers and their behavior, the communities they belong to and how they interact within those communities.

Xtract is based in London and Helsinki, and operates across Europe and Asia, working with over 50 blue-chip companies with intensive customer data. www.xtract.com