SOFTWARE DIAGNOSTICS^TM - NEW APPROACH TO BIG PROBLEM

New services and technologies are opening less expensive and faster ways to address part of the $60B yearly cost of software bugs

El Segundo, CA, February 10, 2003 - Software bugs cost U.S. companies nearly $60 billion per year, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This is a major reason why companies are having a hard time digesting all of the development and purchases that occurred during the boom of the late 1990s. How can you afford new software when you are still paying a heavy price for your existing buggy software?

Luckily, new services and new tools are helping address key parts of this problem. At the forefront of this trend is TechEmpower and their remarkable "Software Diagnostics"^TM service. They claim the ability to root out the nastiest of problems in software or database systems within a week. To their credit, they back up their claim with success at several Fortune 500 companies. Of course, most of TechEmpower's clients aren't eager to share that they've used the service. Who wants to admit their software is having trouble? And that's especially true these days when a stock price can change because of software project troubles.

When you talk with Dr. Tony Karrer, CEO of TechEmpower and a former computer science professor, it becomes clear why this service is needed and compelling to so many big name companies.

"Most companies who use our service have very good developers," he says. "However, developers are barely trained in debugging and not trained at all in diagnostics. You put a good developer in front of a foreign system and it takes them weeks to understand it much less be able to help solve a problem. Further, the tools and technologies we use in our service are specialized and fairly expensive. Does it make sense for a development shop to own a license? Sometimes, but it probably doesn't pay to buy a copy until you find out if it will help. The ROI on this offering is extremely compelling, but most clients hire us simply to put out fires and get projects moving again."

Part of TechEmpower's service is providing experts trained in diagnostics and the use of common and well known monitoring, profiling and debugging tools. However, TechEmpower also takes advantage of a new class of tools just emerging in the marketplace. Dr. Karrer calls these "non-intrusive application profiling tools." In fact, TechEmpower recently signed to a partnership with one of the leading players in this field, PATH Communications.

PATH offers a product called P.A.M. (PATH Application Manager), a software-based application behavior management platform that analyzes an application's behavior patterns and enables enterprises to discover and proactively deal with mission-critical problems before they lead to a costly failure. Oded Noy, CTO of PATH Communications, explains, "The approach we take is based on signal processing algorithms used in seismology software. It allows users to dive into detail where it's needed, without impacting system behavior. If the monitoring caused the system to behave differently, you couldn't replicate the bug."

While PATH's P.A.M. and TechEmpower's Software Diagnostics^TM service are specialized and somewhat unique, they appear to be on the forefront of an important and growing trend. Software development organizations must find ways to improve software quality and reduce the cost of addressing reliability, performance and scalability issues. A $60 billion problem is hard to ignore.

Founded in 1997 and based in El Segundo, California, near Los Angeles International Airport, TechEmpower (www.techempower.com) designs and builds custom software, database, Web and training applications for a variety of clients, including Digital Insight, eharmony, Universal Music, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Xerox Corporation.