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Strategic Alliance to Offer Total Solution for Automobile Dealers and Manufacturers
Seattle, WA and Basel, Switzerland (September 2, 2003) - Day, a leading provider of enterprise content management software, and The Cobalt Group, the leading provider of e-business products and services to the automotive retail market, today announced a new strategic alliance. The two companies have signed a value-added reseller agreement to deliver e-business solutions that integrate manufacturer and dealer marketing content based on Day's Communiqué, the company's flagship content, portal and digital asset management platform, and Nitra, Cobalt's industry-leading automotive e-business platform.
As part of the newly signed reseller agreement, Cobalt is the preferred provider of Day products to the North American automotive marketplace. The two companies already serve several of the world's leading automotive manufacturers, including such clients as Volkswagen and DaimlerChrysler. Day and Cobalt will work together to build on their success in delivering cost-effective web applications for automobile manufacturers (OEMs) and dealerships.
"Day's unique connector technology and Cobalt Nitra will work seamlessly together to more rapidly deploy OEM content across dealer-run, consumer-facing Internet applications," said John Holt, president and CEO of the Cobalt Group. "Together, Day and Cobalt will help strengthen brand control for manufacturers and provide dealers with easy-to-use tools for faster, better and more complete access to high quality, manufacturer-provided content."
"The combination of Communiqué's flexible, leading-edge content management capabilities and Cobalt's extensive experience and leadership in automotive e-business will lead to a new generation of innovative e-business solutions for dealers and automobile manufacturers," said Michael Moppert, Chairman and CEO of Day. "We are delighted to add Cobalt and its broad dealer network to the synergy of our company's products and to our own network of value-added applications for key vertical markets."
Day's Communiqué is an integrated content management, portal management and digital asset management framework that manages and unifies digital business information, applications and processes through the web. Communiqué's content-centric approach and its innovative ContentBus architecture transform entire global organizations into virtual enterprises, bringing together content from any system, regardless of location, language or platform. This approach enables enterprises to access structured and unstructured content from multiple back-end data sources, eliminating the need and cost for a separate repository and allowing consistent control over all content and interactions across an enterprise. Since both Communiqué and Nitra are built as native J2EE applications, they can be implemented at substantially reduced cost, time and risk.
Cobalt's Nitra is the leading e-business platform for automotive retail, with more than 3,500 dealerships and fifteen OEM retail networks using the system on a daily basis. Nitra provides flexible online content management and control for OEMs, dealers groups and individual dealerships. Features include user-friendly content management and design tools that enable dealerships to update website pictures, color and layout in real time using Nitra's simple interface. Dealerships can also quickly access manufacturer and dealer group marketing content as well as manage and share dealer text and images.
Cobalt will focus on offering Communiqué and Nitra to automotive manufacturers and large dealer groups as a marketing content and brand site solution fully integrated with retail networks. Users within the large enterprise can leverage Communiqué's easy-to-use content management tools and ensure that corporate brand content is consistently maintained and updated across individual dealer sites. Dealers can utilize their Cobalt Nitra tools to manage their dealership Internet marketing efforts and select from approved corporate content to display on their websites.
About Day (www.day.com) Day is a leading provider of integrated content, portal and digital asset management software. Day's technology Communiqué offers a comprehensive, rapidly deployable framework to unify and manage all digital business data, systems, applications and processes through the web. Communiqué's content-centric architecture, and its innovative ContentBus, turns the entire business into a virtual repository, bringing together content from any system, regardless of location, language or platform.
Day is an international company, founded in 1993, and listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange New Market (SWX: DAYN) since April 2000. Day's customers are some of the largest global corporations and include Audi, Escada, General Electric, Hugo Boss, Intercontinental Hotels Group, McDonald's, UBS and Volkswagen.
Contact Information
Cobalt Corporate Communications
Email: press@cobaltgroup.com
Phone: (206)219-8022
