New Compuware Solution to Unite Business and Information Technology Across Companies

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. --August 16, 2000 -- Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ:CPWR) today announced a key component of its B2B e-commerce strategy. UNIFACE Eight will enable automation and integration of business processes across companies. The new product will unite the worlds of business and IT, revolutionizing the way large-scale software applications are built. UNIFACE Eight will enable companies to deliver highly scalable, flexible e-commerce applications that extend the scope of business transactions beyond enterprise boundaries, increasing productivity, reducing costs and improving customer service.

UNIFACE Eight will allow business analysts to model business processes and enable them to specify requirements and modify them at deployment time in response to fluid market conditions, a must in a B2B world. In addition, UNIFACE Eight will facilitate end-to-end integration of the supply-chain by supporting BizTalk, SOAP, XML, WAP, CORBA, COM, EJB, SAP, MQSeries, all major databases and all major hardware platforms. By allowing suppliers to be linked at the back end and customers at the front end, UNIFACE Eight will improve productivity, time-to-market, customer satisfaction and competitive position.

"The complexity of building, deploying and maintaining B2B applications demands solid application lifecycle practices," said Tracy Corbo, Senior Analyst, Application Development Strategies, Hurwitz Group. "The entire business process needs to be understood, automated, deployed and maintained. This cannot be achieved without an underlying platform that encompasses all phases of the application development lifecycle. UNIFACE Eight is designed with this concept in mind, because B2B applications are going to be the ultimate challenge in business process automation."

The four most critical areas in the development of large-scale B2B e-commerce applications are Business Process Automation, development productivity, end-to-end integration and technology management. UNIFACE Eight will focus on each of these four areas:

Business Process Automation

UNIFACE Eight will allow business analysts to model business processes and ensure that they are fully understood before the technology issues are addressed. This results in business process acceleration and increased reliability, manageability and flexibility. UNIFACE's process automation capabilities assign business tasks to people's roles within an organization and define the flow of the tasks executed by the business objects. At runtime, the business rules and the workflow of the application can be changed dynamically to optimize the process. If required, more resources can be assigned to specific tasks to resolve bottlenecks in the process workflow. The UNIFACE business process engine will then automatically balance the load over these newly available resources.

Development Productivity

Development productivity is achieved through component-based development and change management. Component construction is carried out using the UNIFACE Component Construction Workbench, one of the industry's most powerful component creation environments. In this model-driven environment, complex presentation and business logic components can be created. UNIFACE components will run on a variety of hardware platforms utilizing many different technologies, including client/server and web-user interfaces and many different databases. In addition, UNIFACE helps customers build applications with the Java construction environment.

End-to-End Integration

The UNIFACE Integration Workbench allows components to be visually integrated into a new application. The workbench manages the interaction between the components and provides a productive application integration environment that facilitates reuse. Component management is simplified by the inclusion of browsing and impact analysis tools. At application deployment time, XML is used to bridge UNIFACE and non-UNIFACE components. Applications can not only include UNIFACE components but also non-UNIFACE components, such as COM, CORBA, ERP, Java and legacy components.

Technology Management

The pace of innovation in Internet systems means that software and hardware infrastructure may change fundamentally in a relatively short period. An architecture that is immune to changes in the underlying technology is necessary to maximize the life of strategic applications. UNIFACE Eight offers infrastructure-, platform- and DBMS- independence in addition to scalability, enabling organizations to easily manage their technology into the future.

"The B2B era is upon us and large organizations ignore it at their peril," said Edwin Schumacher, Compuware Director of Product Management for UNIFACE products. "The basis of any B2B initiative is the automation of the business processes currently captured in the traditional stove pipe applications that serve internal groups of users, such as sales, manufacturing or billing. In a B2B world, these processes need to be integrated over the Internet to serve external users such as customers, partners and suppliers. UNIFACE Eight will enable organizations to deliver applications that become the business process allowing companies to take full advantage of the e-commerce opportunity."

UNIFACE Eight is scheduled for commercial availability in November 2000.

UNIFACE

UNIFACE is Compuware's development environment for building, renewing and integrating strategic applications. UNIFACE focuses on the critical areas of e-commerce, enterprise application integration and legacy renewal to reduce the cost of ownership of business-critical applications and increase the return on investment of the IT budget.

Compuware Corporation

With fiscal 2000 revenues of more than $2.2 billion, Compuware is a world leader in the practical implementation of enterprise and e-commerce solutions. Compuware software products and professional services help 14,000 of the world's largest corporations more efficiently maintain and enhance their most critical business applications. Compuware products and services improve quality, lower costs and increase the speed at which systems can be developed, implemented and supported, providing an immediate and measurable return on information technology investments. Compuware employs more than 15,000 information technology professionals worldwide. For more information about Compuware, please contact the corporate offices at 800-521-9353. You may also visit Compuware on the World Wide Web at http://www.compuware.com.