December 08, 2004    — Metreo, a leading provider of comprehensive Pricing Intelligence™, optimization and execution solutions, today announced the release of Metreo Vision, the newest component of Metreo Smart Pricing Suite. Unlike conventional business intelligence tools that offer "generic" reporting and charting capabilities, Metreo Vision is a Pricing Intelligence™ application. It offers pricing-specific analytics to manufacturing and distribution companies who want to measure the pricing performance of products, customers and channels. The product transforms invoice data into insights on otherwise unidentifiable pricing trends and the underlying drivers. Metreo Vision takes the guesswork out of pricing analysis by illuminating the optimal course of action for maximizing revenue and profit potential.

"Today's business leaders are under constant pressure to grow profits without making tradeoffs in revenue growth or market share," said Daphne Carmeli, CEO and co-founder of Metreo. "With Metreo Vision, we have created a Pricing Intelligence™ solution that allows manufacturers and distributors to determine pricing that balances sales volume and profitability in a matter of hours, rather than the days and weeks it used to take. They need to quickly gain visibility into what are their best opportunities. Metreo's robust solution, combined with our extensive expertise in pricing for manufacturers and distributors, helps them quickly and effectively drive increased profits."

Gain Clear Visibility into Pricing
For many businesses, the greatest barrier to rigorous, profit-maximized pricing has been an inability to consolidate and clarify insights from their pricing data and analysis. Metreo Vision delivers unparalleled guidance for making the most informed decisions on the issues that pricing managers and salespeople need to determine every day. Metreo Vision is comprised of easy-to-read interactive charts that enable users to quickly recognize where margins are won or lost, including widely recognized views such as the waterfall analysis (graphical view of cost accounting data). Powerful behind-the-scenes analytics interpret what the various charts mean and provide instant suggestions for actions based on the user's business objectives. By utilizing Metreo Vision companies can avoid unprofitable deals and make decisions that result in better pricing.

Drive Optimal Pricing Decisions
Metreo Vision's recommendations can help companies take measurable action to improve margins and revenues. The product quickly identifies non-performing products and provides guidance for re-pricing or eliminating underperformers. Metreo Vision helps companies focus on the most profitable customers and offers suggestions for improving margins from less profitable customers. Metreo also offers insight into the cost of doing business. For example, some regions or sales channels may be more profitable than others. With this level of information, executives can make decisions about where to invest resources or refocus company expenditures to support profitable sales.

Key capabilities include:

• Analytics at the Speed of Thought
  Pricing analytics quickly explore enterprise pricing data so that executives can immediately pinpoint improvement areas and determine a plan
  of action. Not only does it explain what happened, but why it happened as well.
  
• Advanced Pricing-Specific Visualization
  Vision populates the key charts that are most important for manufacturing and distributor executives, without any need to involve IT. These interactive charts are created using Metreo's pricing domain expertise to provide those executives with a full set of pricing-specific views, such as visualized cost accounting data ("the price waterfall") charts.
• Guided Analytics and Navigation
  Guided analytics proactively translates findings, prioritizes them and guides users on the optimal next course of action.

"Understanding prices and price policies is a huge challenge for many organizations," according to Kosin Huang, Director of Research at Yankee Group. "It takes some companies 9 weeks or more to develop a price list. Early adopters of pricing analytics software tend to have several dispersed data sets in various systems, but no single place to view information in relation to pricing. This means a company cannot readily leverage the information it has."

Availability of Metreo Vision
Metreo Vision is available now and is currently in production with its first Fortune 500 manufacturer that has used it to pinpoint over $20M in untapped revenue and margin potential in the first quarter after its 39-day deployment. Companies who are interested in learning more about Metreo Vision can visit www.metreo.com.

About Metreo's Pricing Solution
Metreo Vision enhances the Metreo Smart Pricing Suite by helping customers identify profit improvement opportunities. The suite enables companies to capture these opportunities by setting prices at the optimal levels and ensuring that those prices are consistently executed in every deal. It consists of the following additional modules:

• Metreo Target ensures that, for each segment, prices are set in a way that balances price competitiveness with profit objectives and customer willingness to pay.
• Metreo Response ensures that company sales representatives quickly and easily understand and respect the guidelines they need to follow in pricing each transaction so that they are focused on winning the right types of customers.

Metreo's Smart Pricing Suite can be deployed modularly, and provides a complete closed-loop solution, enabling companies to see returns in as little as two to three months. Other components can be added as customer's needs grow.

About Metreo
Metreo is the leading provider of comprehensive Pricing Intelligence™, execution and enforcement solutions that demystify and add discipline to the entire pricing process, enabling manufacturers and distributors to drive more profit to the bottom line. Customers include industry leaders such as Eaton Corp., Essex Electric, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Oncology Therapeutics Network (a Bristol-Myers Squibb division) and Owens Corning. The company has been growing at a rate of 300% year-over-year for the past two years and was ranked #1 in The San Francisco Business Times' annual list of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies (2004). They were also named a Rising Star on the 2004 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in North America. More information is available at http://www.metreo.com/.