BURLINGTON, Mass. and LONDON, UK, Nov. 15, 2004 -- Kalido, the leading provider of adaptive enterprise data warehousing software, announced that Owens Corning, a $5 billion world leader of building materials systems and composite systems, has successfully implemented in just 60 days a unique business intelligence (BI) initiative powered by the KALIDO(R) application suite (KALIDO). Kalido's business-model driven data warehousing software enables Owens Corning's Information Access Project (IAP) to more accurately and effectively examine processes impacting gross margins within a flexible architecture that rapidly reflects business change. Owens Corning projects more than $20 million in added profits in the IAP's first year of operation, due in large part to the unprecedented insight into global operations provided by the KALIDO-based solution.

KALIDO enables the IAP project to deliver consolidated and drill-down views of performance throughout business change, and integrates with the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite(TM) from Kalido's strategic technology partner Ascential Software Corporation (Nasdaq: ASCL), the enterprise data integration leader. Ascential Software's Suite enables Owens Corning to profile, cleanse and transform data from across the organization. The combined solution provides Owens Corning with complete, detailed, current and actionable views of worldwide operations - particularly challenging for an organization with operations in more than 30 countries on six continents.

Owens Corning has already reaped benefits from the IAP by identifying products that were being sold at a loss or very low margin. Owens Corning product managers used KALIDO to uncover and research the problems, determine the core issues and identify and correct them.

The IAP will continue to expand in scope to deliver a more comprehensive business intelligence system, encompassing other analyses such as production statistics, sales reporting and planning, marketing programs, and a variety of financial and other reporting.

Klaus Mikkelsen, Global Development Leader, Information Systems, Owens Corning said: "To compete effectively in today's aggressive environment, Owens Corning required a comprehensive and detailed understanding of its global operations. Given the size, complexity and geography of our business, we needed a best-in-class enterprise data warehousing solution that could provide us with timely decision support. The combination of solutions from Kalido and Ascential Software has provided us with a game changing infrastructure within an unprecedented short timeframe.

"The flexibility and the iterative capabilities of the KALIDO architecture have allowed us to develop and support new partnerships with our business leaders focused on finding, defining and implementing the best business solutions for Owens Corning," he added.

While Owens Corning has significantly improved costs and productivity in recent years, an aggressively competitive market necessitated a steady, drastic improvement of gross margin management. In order to accomplish this, the organization required a comprehensive business intelligence system that could provide actionable data and analysis to users, enabling improved insight into worldwide product, customer and market information.

Owens Corning had selected Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite(TM) for the data integration and the analytical Metreo and Corporate Radar as the reporting tools, and wanted a flexible data warehouse solution to sit in the middle. After an extensive proof of value (POV) process comparing KALIDO to existing data warehouse systems, Owens Corning selected KALIDO because of its adaptability, speed and business-model driven architecture.

The KALIDO adaptive enterprise data warehousing software enabled Owens Corning to accomplish what the POV showed to be impossible with their previous data warehouse system: deployment of the IAP's first phase to 161 users in less than two months. Owens Corning achieved this accelerated implementation by relying on the unique iterative nature of the KALIDO data warehouse environment.

The KALIDO approach relies on data integration software that can keep up with the rapid pace of development, and Ascential Software fits this requirement. Owing to the strong alliance between the companies and the strength of their respective products, Owens Corning was also able to realize the time to market advantages of using an integrated software solution rather than assembling a solution from point products.

More information on the implementation can be found on: http://www.kalido.com/customers/project.asp?cp_ID=20

"Executives from forward thinking organizations such as Owens Corning recognize the insight into valuable business performance metrics that KALIDO offers allows them to significantly maximize business efficiencies and drive increased corporate profits," said Bob Potter, chief executive officer, Kalido. "Our software's innate ability to adapt to an enterprise's business requirements throughout its lifecycle makes it particularly suited for multinational corporations that need to quickly respond to dynamic and evolving market conditions. In addition, our close relationship with Ascential allows us to provide a highly comprehensive and reliably integrated solution."

"The challenges in today's business is in the realm of managing information assets and ensuring that you can integrate data from disparate systems on a timely basis while obtaining the highest levels of information quality," said Mark Smith, SVP Research, Ventana Research. "Owens Corning, by working with Ascential and Kalido, has brought these elements together to help them advance their opportunity to realize performance improvement."

About Kalido

Kalido provides adaptive enterprise data warehousing software to Global 2000 companies. The KALIDO(R) application suite (KALIDO) delivers consolidated views of enterprise performance and can immediately adapt them to major changes in the business such as mergers and acquisitions, reorganization, market consolidation, or new regulatory requirements. This improves the speed and accuracy of management and financial reporting without the cost and delay of operational system standardization. Kalido customers who have measured the business benefits of their projects have typically found they have derived annual savings of millions, and in some cases tens of millions, of dollars through improved management of their company performance and reduction of IT costs.

With KALIDO, companies can rapidly create and manage adaptive data warehouses and associated master data throughout their lifecycle, benefiting from the software's strategic flexibility, low cost and speed of deployment. An independently audited study shows that KALIDO saves as least 55 percent in ownership costs compared to custom-built approaches, a figure surpassed by real-life customer experiences. A typical KALIDO data warehouse implementation takes 2-5 months, as opposed to 9-18 months for conventional methods.

Kalido customers include some of the largest companies in the world, such as BP, Cadbury Schweppes, HBOS plc, Intelsat, Labatt Breweries of Canada, Owens Corning, Philips, Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (Shell) and Unilever. These companies and many others use Kalido's award-winning software in over 100 countries for their enterprise-wide data warehousing and master data management projects.

A privately-held company, Kalido is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. and London, UK and has regional sales offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and France. More information about Kalido can be found at: http://www.kalido.com.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release contains forward-looking statements based on current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events, and these statements are subject to important factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this release address a variety of subjects including, for example, the functionality, characteristics, quality and performance capabilities of Ascential Software's products and technology; results achievable and benefits attainable through deployment of Ascential Software's products and provision of services; reduction of cost of ownership; and increased return on IT investment. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements: the ability of Ascential Software to expand its market share; growth rates for the enterprise data integration software market; general business conditions in the software industry, the technology sector, and in the domestic and international economies; rapid technological change in the markets served by Ascential Software; dependence on international operations; global and geopolitical instability; and difficulties that Ascential Software may experience integrating technologies, operations and personnel of completed or future acquisitions. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to the filings made by Ascential Software with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, the most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Ascential Software disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statements made herein to reflect any change in Ascential Software's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which such statements are based. Ascential Software is not responsible for statements attributed to third parties within this release or in any materials referenced herein.

Kalido
Zoe White, +44 20 79 34 33 00
zoe.white@kalido.com