Sterling Commerce Expands B2B Managed Services Offering

COLUMBUS, OH--(Marketwire - September 8, 2008) - Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) subsidiary, today announced it has expanded Sterling Commerce Managed Services (SCMS), the company's business-to-business (B2B) outsourcing offering. The company has expanded SCMS' best-in-class capabilities to help companies excel at B2B collaboration with new global capabilities, data center enhancements, and new capabilities in enabling companies to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and compliance regulations.

According to a Gartner report, "Between 2007 and 2012, we expect Global 2000 companies to at least double their multi-enterprise traffic (transactions, documents and process execution events)." The report added, "Midsize to large businesses will need to implement different styles of multi-enterprise collaboration to meet diverse external partner requirements." ("Market Trends: Multienterprise/B2B Infrastructure Market, Worldwide, 2008," March 10, 2008.)

One method of achieving multi-enterprise collaboration is B2B outsourcing, and Sterling Commerce is already seeing significant momentum behind SCMS, particularly in manufacturing. SCMS delivers three differentiating strengths:

--  A world class and "dial tone"-reliable B2B infrastructure based on
    Sterling Commerce market-leading B2B integration solutions;
--  The tools and highly skilled professionals to manage document delivery
    processes against an agreed-upon service level agreement (SLA) that makes
    sense to the business; and
--  True global support for customers and their trading partners,
    delivered on-continent 24x7x365 in 20 countries and 9 languages.  All
    positions, ranging from level 1 help desk through software engineers
    maintaining the Sterling Commerce B2B infrastructure, are Sterling Commerce
    employees.
    

U.S. customers, including Alabama Farmers Cooperative, Big Time Products LLC., The Hillman Group, and Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH), are leveraging SCMS to accelerate customer and partner collaboration and be more agile in meeting new demands. (See related releases, "The Hillman Group Achieves 'Electronic Edge' with Sterling Commerce B2B Collaboration Services," and "Fifteenth Fastest Growing Company in U.S. Chooses Sterling Commerce for Managed B2B Integration Services.")

"With our extensive EDI expertise and deep B2B process management capabilities, Sterling Commerce Managed Services delivers the people and processes that companies need to outpace their competition," said Phil Smith, vice president, Global Product Management, at Sterling Commerce. "Companies can use supply chain agility and adaptability as a differentiator by leveraging managed services to achieve a better B2B operation for less cost than in-house operations."

Sterling Commerce Extends Best-in-Class Capabilities of SCMS

To meet the needs of the Global 2000, Sterling Commerce recently announced the availability in Australia, China, and Japan of Sterling Collaboration Network, the company's on demand B2B integration network used with SCMS. Earlier this year, the company completed a $16 million data center project, leveraging more than 27,000 man hours, to create a secure and scalable multi-tenancy B2B environment. Enhancements included new redundant hardware and communications systems, a new WAN architecture, and RAID technology for storage devices.

In addition to expanding the global reach of its services and strengthening its technical infrastructure, Sterling Commerce has added new capabilities to help companies meet customer SLAs and compliance regulations. New capabilities in prioritizing documents -- deferred delivery and priority processing -- enable customers to prioritize the receipt or sending of certain documents to meet SLAs with their trading partners. In addition, Sterling Commerce has added new expectant circumstance alerting, which enables companies to establish alerts when prioritized events don't occur, which is especially important when timing of those events is a factor. To help companies meet audit and compliance requirements, Sterling Commerce has added new configurable data retention and document extraction capabilities that simplify the process for searching, sorting and reporting transactions and make it easier to populate transaction data into business intelligence tools for auditing and trend analysis.

About Sterling Commerce

Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), helps customers thrive in a global economy by connecting their business communities, processes, people and technology. More than 30,000 customers worldwide -- including 80 percent of the Fortune 500 -- use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration, multi-channel selling, and supply chain fulfillment to improve profitability inside and outside their company walls. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Sterling Commerce has offices in 19 countries and most major cities around the world. More information on the company can be found at www.sterlingcommerce.com.

Contact Information: For more information, contact: Julie Redard Sterling Commerce (978) 513-6386 Jamie Leicht Fleishman-Hillard (619) 237-7711