05/18/2004

Jacada (NASDAQ: JCDA), a developet of solutions “that accelerate business improvement,” introduced Jacada Fusion, “a first-to-market solution that delivers The Perfect Interaction between people, process, and information.”

Jacada offered these details:

By fusing applications to deliver a simplified user interaction, Jacada Fusion eliminates the costly problems arising from the complexity and multiplicity of applications that users must navigate in order to accomplish even simple business processes.

With Jacada Fusion, organizations can rapidly change and improve their business processes without rewriting or replacing their underlying applications, thereby achieving significant returns on investment in months instead of years.

As companies and their systems have grown, the combinations of functional applications they rely on - from corporate-wide ERP and CRM applications, to in-house developed departmental programs, to systems inherited through acquisitions - have created a morass of complexity that is strangling corporate speed and agility while stifling user productivity and innovation. Jacada Fusion is a platform-independent, risk-free solution that simplifies how users access and manage data in multiple systems, hence accelerating their ability to respond to customers and market changes.

"For the first time, companies can rapidly implement their own vision of the perfect interaction between employees, customers, suppliers, and partners - creating and changing processes as needed, regardless of how many or what types of systems they use," said Gideon Hollander, Jacada CEO.

Jacada Fusion 'fuses' all types of applications – Windows, Web and Host-based, to deliver a simplified user interface eliminating the need to navigate through and between applications. Jacada Fusion eliminates redundant data entry, cuts keystrokes and streamlines process steps which result in driving new revenue for the business and cutting costs associated with training and employee turnover.

Call centers, especially, are expected to benefit dramatically from Jacada Fusion. System complexity negatively impacts many critical areas of call center operations, from call handling times, to employee training and attrition, to customer satisfaction levels. System complexity and incompatibility also impede up-sell and cross-sell opportunities as representatives lack either the customer knowledge or the time to propose additional products of interest to the caller.

Call center managers measure productivity in seconds. According to leading customer service expert, Lior Arussy, CEO of Strativity, "While companies place increasing importance on quality of service, very little attention is given to quality of information. Navigating through endless sources of information causes sales and service professionals to waste customers' time, and negatively impacts the outcome of their interactions. Jacada Fusion addresses a real problem whose time has come."

According to John Sanley, executive vice president of West Corporation, one of the world's largest customer contact solution providers, "Jacada Fusion gives us the ability to rapidly create customized customer interactions without worrying about the complexity of the systems behind those processes. This is a competitive advantage that will improve the customer experience."

Jacada WinFuse Integrates Windows Client/Server Applications Jacada Fusion is made possible through the simultaneous release of another first-to market product offering, Jacadaâ WinFuse. Building on the company's leadership position in application integration technology, Jacada has developed the first robust, flexible and non-intrusive way to integrate Windows-based client/server applications. Jacada WinFuse completes the company's suite of technologies enabling Jacada to deliver a total solution, regardless of platform or application type.

The United States Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) is one of the first to implement Jacada Fusion. NAVFAC radically improved the contracts administration process by automating the interface between two "untouchable" systems that manage over $6 billion in annual contract awards and process tens of thousands of contract actions annually.

Before Jacada Fusion, the solicitation, award and modification of contracts required users to enter the same information manually multiple times into separate systems. Using Jacada Fusion, for the first time these contract management transactions are automated and the data is integrated across these systems. NAVFAC had been searching for a low cost, low risk solution and found Jacada had a compelling answer for all of their disparate systems – mainframe, Web, and Windows.

"With the use of Jacada Fusion, these historically unattainable interfaces were successfully developed and tested in only four months," said David Holmes, executive vice president at Jacada. "NAVFAC expects a complete return on investment within six months after deployment."

Embratel, in Brazil, the largest telecommunications company in Latin America, is another early adopter of Jacada Fusion. "To identify and stop toll fraud we have to navigate through several different systems. It is a process that takes up to 35 minutes per incident," said Cliff Jordan, Toll Fraud Manager, Embratel. "Choosing to implement Jacada Fusion is a strategic decision for us because it fundamentally changes, and dramatically improves, how we fight fraud."

“In our initial implementation of Jacada Fusion, we have automated the process of searching between several of our key mainframe and Web-based applications and are now experiencing processing times that are approaching the five minute range," said Jordan. "This has a tremendous impact to our operations We now can investigate and stop many more toll fraud cases per day. Jacada has shown they are dedicated to helping us meet our needs in improving our bottom line."