Black Pearl Extends Its Enterprise Decision Management Platform With OneChannel MergerBlack Pearl Receives $5 Million in Additional Funding From Advanced Technology Ventures to Fuel Aggressive Pursuit of Emerging Category MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 19, 2003 -- Black Pearl, a pioneering provider of solutions for Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), today announced that it has completed its merger with OneChannel, a provider of business intelligence software. The merger accelerates Black Pearl's product strategy to provide the first complete Enterprise Decision Management platform that enables companies to manage, track and improve real-time decision-making. Black Pearl also received an additional $5 million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures to pursue future growth goals. "Black Pearl has established its ability to automate the thousands of daily, real-time decisions at companies such as Deutsche Bank Alex Brown," said Steve Baloff, General Partner, Advanced Technology Ventures. "With the addition of OneChannel's intelligent dashboard and alerting capabilities, Black Pearl can now provide more strategic control of decisions with visibility into performance and exceptions at an aggregate level." The real-time enterprise requires that decisions be made in real-time, but the complex analysis required to make effective judgment-based decisions cannot be performed in real-time. This results in inefficient processes where people make decisions based on instinct rather than data. Enterprise Decision Management addresses this challenge by delivering expert advice directly into business user applications in real-time, tracking performance of advice, and learning from what worked and what did not in order to improve future decision advice. Knowledge Broker(TM) is Black Pearl's core platform for Enterprise Decision Management. Based on models that embody an enterprise's information and "know-how," Knowledge Broker continuously monitors for business opportunities and threats, automates the complex analysis required to determine appropriate actions, and integrates expert advice into user applications. Knowledge Broker is ideal for organizations in which individuals routinely exercise human judgment in making non-trivial operational business decisions. Black Pearl also provides vertical application solutions -- known as Scenarios -- to expedite implementations in high ROI areas such as interactive selling and support, portfolio management, compliance management, exception management, order management and inventory management. "We're extremely excited to be able to accelerate our product roadmap," said Lisa Hammitt, founding CTO of Black Pearl. "By tightly integrating OneChannel's business intelligence capabilities into the Black Pearl product line, we are the first vendor to have integrated both operational and strategic decision-making components into a complete EDM solution." "Our mission is to enable the real-time enterprise through managing real- time decisions," said Max Seybold, CEO of Black Pearl. "The merger has greatly enhanced our product offering, management team and employee base, and represents a major milestone in our aggressive push towards achieving our vision." About Black Pearl Black Pearl provides Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) solutions that enable the real-time enterprise. Black Pearl helps companies optimize decisions around real-time interactions, resulting in improved transaction decisions, higher customer retention and greater productivity. Black Pearl was founded in 1998 and is located in Mountain View, California. Investors include Advanced Technology Ventures, Reuters, Intel, UBS PaineWebber, and Dain Rauscher Wessels. For more information, contact Black Pearl at http://www.blackpearl.com or info@blackpearl.com. SOURCE Black Pearl Web Site: http://www.blackpearl.com |