BOSTON, Mass. (August 29, 2001) –Vality^® Technology, Inc., the leader in enterprise data quality management solutions, today announced that The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Inc. (A&P, NYSE: GAP) has selected Vality INTEGRITY to help it better manage its inventory and suppliers and to reduce procurement costs.

A&P operates combination food and drug stores, conventional supermarkets, and limited assortment food stores in the US and Canada under the A&P brand and other names. The company will use Vality’s INTEGRITY software to cleanse and consolidate its vendor and product data before loading it into a retail-specific data warehouse. This process will ensure that A&P’s data warehouse always contains accurate information for business analysis.

"Our goal is to ensure that A&P’s data warehouse provides the integrated, enterprise-wide information the company needs to make better business decisions. Using INTEGRITY, A&P will have more control over their data quality, enabling the company to deliver its full return on investment," said Mark Atkins, president and CEO of Vality.

Vality’s flagship INTEGRITY software enables companies to re-purpose operational data into strategic enterprise intelligence. INTEGRITY standardizes inconsistent, incomplete, and inaccurately input data; uncovers patterns and relationships; and consolidates views of customers, suppliers, parts, products, and other strategic information – providing 100 percent visibility for better decision-making.

Founded in 1859, A&P was one of the nation’s first supermarket chains, and is today one of North America’s 10 largest. The Company operates over 750 stores in 16 states, the District of Columbia and Ontario, Canada under the following trade names: A&P, Waldbaum’s, Food Emporium, Super Foodmart, Super Fresh, Farmer Jack, Kohl’s, Sav-A-Center, Dominion, The Barn Markets, Food Basics and Ultra Food & Drug.

Vality Technology (www.vality.com <http://www.vality.com>) is the pioneer and recognized leader in data standardization and matching software as well as data quality consulting services. Its customers and partners include Global 5000 corporations in finance, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications, energy, and utilities, including Aetna U.S. Healthcare^®, IBM^®, Marks & Spencer^®, NatWest^®, www.onlinesuppliers.com corp.^™, Telstra^®, and UPS^®. These companies rely on Vality’s patent-pending technology to develop and implement enterprise data quality management solutions for the Internet economy. These solutions help companies re-engineer existing operational data and incoming real-time Web data to maintain high-quality enterprise data as well as achieve accurate, complete information on customers, suppliers and products and all their relationships for business applications. Vality was recently listed in Boston Magazine's Best Places to Work; selected one of the 15 Stars of eCommerce by eCom Advisory; and named one of the TOP 500 Software companies by Software Magazine.