Press release

Valista Joins IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks To Deliver On Demand Solutions

IBM and Valista Help Operators Quickly Deploy Advanced Payment Solutions for Premium Content and Services

IRISH PRESIDENTIAL TRADE MISSION – SEATTLE, 25th May 2005 – As part of the Irish Presidential Trade Mission, Valista®, the global leader in payments and offer management software enabling the purchase of premium services, today announced that it has joined the IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks program to deliver on demand solutions for telecommunications customers. Through PartnerWorld Industry Networks, Valista takes advantage of IBM's sales, marketing and technical expertise to develop and deliver on demand solutions that meet industry-specific customer requirements.

IBM and Valista are working together to implement a payment and offer management solution offering. The combined solutions can enable operators to drive new revenue streams from premium services and attract new subscribers. Additionally, the IBM and Valista combined solution can increase the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by providing offer creation, promotions and discounting, and multiple payment capabilities.

“This enhanced relationship gives North American operators the necessary technologies to quickly expand their current service offerings and create new business opportunities,” Raomal Perera, chief executive officer of Valista. “By working together, Valista and IBM will continue to advance the next technology epoch by designing, constructing and delivering open and scalable software that helps accelerate the rapidly emerging business of wireless premium services.”

“Access to open-standards based products on which to build cost effective solutions is crucial to customers,” said Buell Duncan, general manager, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM. “We are pleased that Valista has joined PartnerWorld Industry Networks, committing to IBM as a partner of choice, to deliver on demand business solutions to customers within the telecommunication industry.”

As part of this relationship, Valista’s PaymentsPlus and OffersPlus technologies will be tightly integrated into the IBM SPDE Architecture. Heterogeneous bundles which group different types of products, ringtones, logos, videos and physical goods were, up to now, difficult to create and often required the duplication of heavy product catalogs from content providers. The powerful combination of solutions from IBM and Valista can deliver a more robust and flexible alternative for wireless carriers around the globe.

Valista’s product portfolio supports high and low-value payments (PaymentsPlus), offer management and multi-merchant bundling, promotions (OffersPlus), multi-channel and cash-based top-up and cash replacement for anonymous payments (TopupPlus Multi-channel). Valista can now enable customers to devise and implement flexible business strategies around premium services, covering a wide range of issues from creating multi-merchant bundled offerings to managing the full payments lifecycle.

The IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks provide ISVs with comprehensive go-to-market sales support and technical resources that are specifically tailored to their industry requirements. As part of the PartnerWorld Industry Networks, ISVs can team with IBM and bring joint solutions out to market faster and industry-by-industry, reflecting how customers are buying technology today. ISVs who achieve the optimized level have successfully enabled and validated their industry applications on IBM infrastructure software and hardware. ISVs can sign up for the PartnerWorld Industry Networks at www.ibm.com/isv.

Notes:
For more information, please contact:

Valista®
Evanna Kearins
Director, Marketing.
Email: marketing@valista.com

Reichert Communications
Meghan O’Driscoll
Tel: +1 415 296 5132/ +1 925 785 9192
Email: meghan@reichertcom.com

About Valista.
Valista is the leading provider of multi-channel payments and offer management software for the purchase of premium services over web and mobile channels. The combined subscriber base with access to the Valista product suite exceeds 150 million users with over 2000 merchants utilizing the company’s merchant integration technology. Valista’s products support the entire commerce ecosystem and cover the end-to-end business processes including multi-channel ordering, authentication, payment, settlement, service delivery, and post-purchase care. Key customers: AOL, Vodafone UK, France Telecom's w-HA, Orange, Wanadoo, Tiscali, T-Online and VirginMega.fr (France), NTT DoCoMo, 3 (eight countries) and GTECH. Valista was formed from the merger of Network365 and iPIN in November 2003.

Valista won ‘Best Wireless Application Developer’ at the GSM Association Awards 2004 and has been chosen by both Red Herring and Tornado Insider as one of the Top 100 global companies.

Valista® and ‘accelerating commerce™’ and ‘new ways to purchase with multiple ways to pay™’ payments software enabling the purchase of premium services™’ are registered trademarks and trademarks of Valista Limited. All other trademarks and registered trademarks referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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