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Untermauerung meines vorhergehenden Postings (Teil 1)

INCREASING DEMAND FOR PROCUREMENT BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING AND DIFFERENTIATED OFFERING HELP MARKET SHARE LEADER ICG COMMERCE ACHIEVE STRONG 2004 RESULTS

Procurement-Only Focus, Deep Market Experience, Comprehensive Offering Focused on Operational Improvements And Continuous Value Generation Combine To Drive Over 175% Growth In Services Backlog

PHILADELPHIA - March 9, 2005 - ICG Commerce, a leading procurement services provider, today announced key business results for 2004. The company signed 55 contracts during the year and achieved consistent double-digit quarter-over-quarter growth. The strong momentum is reflective of the company's track record of producing results for leading companies and points to its comprehensive approach to procurement as the most effective model for driving bottom-line savings and process efficiencies.

Among the new contracts signed in 2004 were eight agreements for comprehensive procurement management or outsourcing services, including those with new customers Avaya, Cooper Cameron Corp., Greif, Inc., Universal Packaging Corp., and Vought Aircraft Industries, Inc. In addition, extensions were signed with a number of long-term customers such as Crown, Cork & Seal, Delta Air Lines, Indalex and Nordstrom.

"In 2004 ICG Commerce quantifiably distinguished itself as the leader in procurement-BPO with strong performance in customer acquisition,” said Edward H. West, chairman and CEO of ICG Commerce. “Our differentiated and comprehensive offering combined with external market factors have helped bring the procurement business process to the fore, elevating it from a back office function to a key business performance driver.” West added, “Further to the additions we’ve made on the customer front, we continue to add to our team of experts, most notably through the addition of Michael Zisman, former vice president, corporate strategy at IBM and current ICG Commerce and Internet Capital Group board member."

Due to the number of multi-year customer relationships secured in 2004, the value of ICG Commerce's services backlog (the value of all remaining contracted revenue) grew in excess of 175% throughout the year. Key market factors contributing to the company's growth included continued strong demand for overall cost reduction across industries and an increasing focus on core competencies. "Over the past few years, corporations in the U.S. and Europe began, in earnest, outsourcing major but non-core business processes, such as procurement, finance and accounting and human resource management," said Zisman. "This allows companies to focus on their core-competencies and benefit from the focus, expertise and cost effectiveness of others."

These factors continue to drive procurement-BPO growth as organizations increasingly realize that procurement transformation is an important vehicle for battling pressures on the purchase of indirect and direct materials, which in turn, impact product costs and profit margins.

"Recently, we have seen an increased appreciation at the senior executive level for the power of the procurement function to improve business performance," said Zisman. "Although procurement software alone automates some of the necessary processes, it severely understates the full savings potential of a proactive effort to improve overall procurement operations. The market is beginning to recognize the leadership role outsourcing can play in that process."

Impacting results more directly than external market forces was the company's model, which focuses exclusively on driving results through comprehensive procurement transformation. The ICG Commerce approach marries deep purchasing category expertise; process and operations specialists; and a comprehensive but flexible technology platform to build and execute programs that produce sustainable and measurable savings for customers year after year.

According to research published last year by analyst firm Nelson Hall, ICG Commerce currently leads the procurement-BPO industry in market share. In 2004, the company also earned recognition from both the Outsourcing Center and Forbes magazine as a leader in procurement outsourcing, which many have proclaimed to be the fastest-growing BPO segment.

Continuing to innovate, ICG Commerce made several infrastructure and organizational enhancements over the course of the year, including the unveiling of a Procurement Center of Excellence at the company’s new headquarters outside Philadelphia. Dozens of customers, prospects and industry experts have visited the center over the past six months to learn best practices and gain an inside look at the team managing transactions and purchasing activities on behalf of many of the world’s leading companies.

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About ICG Commerce, Inc.
ICG Commerce (www.icgcommerce.com)is a leading Procurement Services Provider exclusively focused on helping companies buy more effectively and efficiently in order to reduce costs significantly and continuously. The company offers an unmatched combination of process and category expertise and hosted technology to deliver Sourcing, Purchase-to-Pay Automation and Outsourcing Services. ICG Commerce Inc., a privately held company founded in 1992, is a member of Internet Capital Group’s (Nasdaq: ICGE) network of partner companies and has been honored as one of Forbes’ ‘Best of the Web: B2B’, UPSIDE Magazine’s ‘Hot 100’ and as an iSource 100 company.

“We are extremely pleased with the progress we have made within the market over the past year,” said CommerceQuest CEO Michael Forster. “The growth that we’ve achieved is strong evidence that our TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS is delivering significant value. In 2005, we will continue to help both new and existing customers achieve their business objectives through improved process efficiency and flexibility.”

CommerceQuest announced several strategic partnerships in 2004, including a new relationship with IBM to resell Process Manager for Data (PM4Data) to enhance IBM’s On Demand strategy. This joint enterprise integration platform has already illustrated benefits to customers, such as Charming Shoppes, Inc. and Standard Chartered Bank, who wanted to manage the movement of data across multi-platform environments, as well as gain visibility into disparate systems throughout the enterprise.

CommerceQuest extended its ecosystem of partners with new Value Add Solution Partners (VASP) and Technology Partner relationships. The Normandy Group, a Cognos Pinnacle partner, joined the VASP program capitalizing on the synergy between corporate performance management and business process management. In addition, a Technology Partnership was established with Mercury Interactive Corporation.

New partnerships with Mindjet and iGrafx were also announced in 2004. These relationships enable companies to complete the entire business process lifecycle with combined analysis, mapping, and execution capabilities via CommerceQuest’s Universal Process Engine. By using analysis, simulation and mapping tools, enterprises typically notice a 20-33 percent improvement in cycle time and throughput; however, executing and integrating processes with the Universal Process Engine from CommerceQuest can attain an additional 25-30 percent improvement.

Globally, CommerceQuest continued to build strategic partnerships throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Trinity Expert Systems and Devoteam are two leading solution-oriented companies aligning with CommerceQuest to provide marketplace differentiation for continued growth in a highly competitive environment, as well as to enable customer success through Enterprise BPM.

Another significant company milestone in 2004 was the announcement of TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS 8.1. This product enhancement featured new capabilities within the Business Innovation Xcelerator and Business Integration Xcelerator. By combining process modeling, workflow, simulation, integration, and extensive activity monitoring and management technologies, TRAXION EnterpriseBPMS enables companies to increase value and productivity, which benefit its bottom line.

About CommerceQuest (www.commercequest.com)
Founded in 1991, CommerceQuest is the only enterprise solutions provider that enables its customers to rapidly turn business strategy into business processes by fully integrating the work that people do with software systems that optimize business performance. CommerceQuest delivers a complete set of scalable business process management (BPM) solutions that leverage existing IT investments to unite people, processes and technology in a service-based architecture that spans the extended enterprise, from the mainframe to the Internet and everything in between. More than 500 industry-leading companies rely on CommerceQuest to help them integrate heterogeneous workflow and IT systems, including many of the Fortune 500 companies such as The Home Depot, Coca-Cola Bottling, Ahold, and American Express.

CommerceQuest is a privately-held company and a member of Internet Capital Group's (Nasdaq: ICGE) collaborative network of Partner Companies.