Corporate purchasing traditionally involves pushing paper forms from office to office, creating a long and tedious process that ends up costing the organization more than the materials being purchased. Experts estimate that it costs buying organizations $150 or more to process every paper-based purchase order, regardless of whether it is for a $10,000 computer or $10 worth of pencils.

AGENTics' technology can slash this cost to as little as $25 by bypassing the myriad steps in the purchasing cycle including vendor catalog selection, purchase-order initiation, order authorization, receipt of the order, acknowledgment of the delivery, receiving the invoice and finally, paying the bill. AGENTics' Self-Service Online Purchasing solution empowers employees within the organization to conduct purchasing activities directly from their corporate desktop, saving the company millions of dollars and man hours.

AGENTics' strategy is to establish a leading position in the business-to-business marketplace by selling its highly customizable product to Global 1000 companies. The company has targeted a number of vertical markets in which it will develop expertise. AGENTics will sell its products directly, and through channel partners including systems integrators and interactive agencies. AGENTics first product in the online purchasing market, SupplyChannel™ , was released in December of 1998.

The Market Need
It is generally accepted today that web-based enterprise-wide purchasing systems can streamline corporate purchasing, making it more efficient by directly linking employees with suppliers. By incorporating the organization's purchasing controls and creating a self-service purchasing environment, the solution virtually eliminates the paper chase as well as the labor costs and time lag associated with a paper-based process.

Advanced Manufacturing Research, a consulting firm in Boston, Mass., "believes that the business case for Internet procurement is so compelling as to be overwhelming...the potential market is so vast that all comers will be hard-pressed to fill the demand. It will be fascinating to watch this market explode."

Killen & Associates, a market research firm in Palo Alto, Ca., reports that among Global 2000 companies, operating resources account for 33% of total corporate expenditures, as compared with 25% for manufacturing resources, and 16% for human resources. The Self-Service Purchasing market is poised for enormous growth, expected to exceed $700 million in software and services by the year 2000.

Indeed, the need has become so great that buying organizations are aggressively seeking self-service purchasing solutions that will help them cope with the inefficiencies inherent to online purchasing. Up until today, the most popular solution has been catalog aggregation which has a myriad number of flaws in its architecture. With catalog aggregation, supplier's product databases (not catalogs as a whole) are duplicated onto the buying organization's purchasing server. Then, they are exported into an aggregated database using a common format. In purchasing sessions, end users access this centralized aggregated database rather than the suppliers' original on-line catalogs. The problems with this solution are:

Obviously, the aggregation solution is very problematic. In fact, in a total digitally connected world like the Internet, a solution of duplicated information is out-of-date.

Another attempt to solve this problem is OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), a standard created by a consortium of Fortune 500 organizations for business-to-business Internet purchasing solutions. The standard is based on the buying organization requisitioners having direct access into the supplier's Web-based catalogs. Unfortunately, the OBI standard is strongly supplier biased. Both the Gartner Group and Granada Research, a newly formed market research firm, believe that OBI's single business process focus and lack of acknowledgment in the shift of power from suppliers to buyer organizations inhibits the standard from getting off the ground. In fact, Gartner claims that unless OBI begins to support buyer-managed aggregated catalogs, the standard will likely vanish.

It's clearly time for a new solution.

The AGENTics Solution
AGENTics has created a new technology paradigm for linking buyers to sellers over the Internet that completely changes the face of online purchasing ñ the Virtual-Catalog.

Serving as the foundation technology, the Virtual Catalog enables AGENTics to provide the most powerful and cost-efficient solution in the self-service purchasing marketplace. AGENTicsí solution,SupplyChannel™, enables employees to execute self-service procurement throughout the enterprise with the maximum speed and ease in todayís industry. Orders for approved goods from approved vendors are placed by employees directly from their desktop via the company's Intranet. Full management control at all stages of the transaction is maintained. SupplyChannelís superior technology solution results in a consistent view, navigation and ordering of products residing in disparate on-line catalogs; while no product information need to be maintained at the buying organizations site -- a first in the industry.

In fact, AGENTics patent-pending Virtual-Catalog technology enables users to simultaneously access multiple on-line catalogs residing at supplier sites as though they were one, unified catalog. Suppliers do not need to provide any special or dedicated interface. The end-result is exceptional, delivering product information with unmatched accuracy, relevancy and uniformity of display in real-time.

This major leap forward in efficiency (no product information maintenance combined with consistent access to product information) delivers an immediate, quantifiable impact on the bottom line through the effective use of aggregate buying data to obtain vendor discounts. This lowers electronic transaction costs, eliminates maverick buys, reduces inefficiency and redundancy in the purchasing cycle and reduces labor costs due to the automation of the approval process. In addition, SupplyChannel™ provides better service to employees, expediting the delivery time of the products while significantly decreasing the red-tape obstacles in the purchasing process. Finally, buyers in the purchasing department are freed up to focus on high value activities rather than just paper-pushing. As a result, SupplyChannel™ makes Self-Service Purchasing easier, faster, less expensive and more effective than ever, providing a new edge in todayís constantly changing competitive environment.

The Company & The Team
Founded in 1996, AGENTics Ltd. is an Israeli company headquartered in Silicon Valley with an additional sales office in Boston, Massachusetts. Its management and professional team possesses extensive experience in business management and development processes as well as the different stages of software products life cycle - starting from pure technology and all the way through packaging and product delivery. In addition, AGENTics management team also has comprehensive experience within the office supply and purchasing industries, providing the right mix of technology and business expertise to succeed with their first marketplace entry, SupplyChannel™.

Oren Horvitz, President, C.E.O, Co-Founder
Oren Horvitz has over 16 years of experience in the software industry. In 1990, he founded Semantics Knowledge Systems, an R&D software firm. In Semantics, Horvitz gained over six years of first hand entrepreneurial experience in business development, business management, marketing and research and development. Horvitz holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).

Paul Rodman, Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Paul Rodman is the founder of one of the largest and most prominent office supply companies in the world. Rodman started the business in Boston, Massachusetts and led the firm to the top of the office supply industry. After selling the business to Boise Cascade Corp., he served as General Manager of Boise's Boston location. After Boise, Rodman started the first marketing group in the U.S. whose dealers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. represented over a billion dollars in sales. Rodman has been featured in many leading publications in the US and the UK and was nominated by Inc. magazine as Entrepreneur of the Year in both 1990 and 1991.

Yael Karov, Vice President of Engineering
Yael Karov has impressive professional and academic results in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence as well as a successful track record in commercial R&D project management. Karov received a B.Sc. in Math and Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science.

Board of Directors

Oren Horvitz, President, C.E.O, Co-Founder
Oren Horvitz has over 16 years of experience in the software industry. In 1990, he founded Semantics Knowledge Systems, an R&D software firm. In Semantics, Horvitz gained over six years of first hand entrepreneurial experience in business development, business management, marketing and research and development. Horvitz holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).

Yoni Cheifetz, Chairman, Co-Founder
Yoni Cheifetz has over 16 years of experience in the software industry. His experience includes business management, marketing, business development and research & development. In 1991, he founded, and still heads the Eventus Group, a successful group of software firms specializing in the development and marketing of decision support products for the world wide financial and industrial communities. Cheifetz received a B.Sc. in Math and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science.

Gary Rieschel
Gary Rieschel is the managing general partner of SOFTBANK Technology Ventures, a venture capital partnership which makes privately negotiated equity and equity-related investments in companies addressing digital information technology opportunities, including Internet communications, commerce and content. Rieschel has been involved in the high technology field for over 15 years. He has held executive positions at Cisco Systems (Director of Worldwide Channels), Sequent (Director) and Intel. Rieschel is on the board of directors of several Internet companies in addition to AGENTics including: USWeb, Concentric and First Virtual and is a member of SOFTBANK's Global Executive Board. Rieschel holds a BA in Biology from Reed College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Scott Russell
Scott Russel is a general partner of SOFTBANK Technology Ventures. Prior to joining SOFTBANK, he spent 16 years managing corporate MIS technology for Swiss Bank, S.G. Warburg, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Russell has been both a major purchaser of technology for these financial institutions as well as the manager of numerous software development teams. While with Warburg, he headed the technology division in Asia and later served on the senior management committee based in London. Russell holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and completed the Executive MBA program at the London School of Business. Russell is also a board member of Buy Corp, SaveSmart, Replicase and FastParts.