WRP selects Ecquaria's B2B e-commerce solution

Singapore, 18 April 2000 - Ecquaria Limited, an e-commerce software company, today announced that Malaysia-based WRP Asia Pacific Sdn Bhd - one of the world's leading manufacturers and distributors of quality glove products - has selected Ecquaria to provide mission-critical, business-to-business e-commerce capabilities.

The agreement supports Ecquaria's strategy to enhance its global presence and the ability to offer e-commerce solutions throughout its regional network of offices in the Asia-Pacific.

WRP will use Ecquaria's flagship products ChannelBeans and MerchantBeans to manage their sales and distribution channels efficiently. The system, to be launched in three months, will be used across the entire WRP Group, and will be introduced to all its existing and potential distribution channels, business partners and customers globally throughout the year 2000.

Riding on the architecture of ecBeans, ChannelBeans is a demand chain business-to-business e-commerce application that helps WRP to reduce the cost of sales, enforce customer loyalty, streamline service and support through online order processing, order tracking, generate requests for quotations, perform inventory status checks, and self-service at any time.

With ChannelBeans, WRP will automate critical business processes such as selling and workflow while enabling integration to existing backend systems.

Complementing ChannelBeans is MerchantBeans, a business-to-consumer application that will allow WRP to host their resellers and enable them to sell directly to end-consumers.

"We believe that Ecquaria's e-commerce products will strengthen our ability to better service our existing customers, improve our operational efficiency and competitiveness in the marketplace, and enable us to reach out to even more business opportunities. WRP's e-commerce strategy augurs well with our strong marketing and distribution network in more than 100 countries world-wide", said Mr. Richard Wong, President and CEO of WRP Group.

"We're both honoured and pleased to be WRP's e-commerce technology partner. Our aim is to help enterprises like WRP leverage the Internet to compete in the New Economy with products and solutions that can help streamline processes, link to back-end systems and enhance their ability to increase top line and watch bottom line," said Dr. Foong, Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer of Ecquaria Limited.

"We share a common, truly global e-commerce vision with WRP and we look forward to strengthening our relationship with them," concluded Dr Foong.

About WRP Asia Pacific

WRP is a manufacturer and distributor of a range of quality glove products for the global healthcare, food and catering, light technology, scientific and industrial sectors. Supporting a distribution network in over 100 countries globally, WRP's sales and marketing offices are located in both Western Europe, USA, Asia Pacific, Central and South America, Africa and the Middle East.

As part of its strategy to become a leading manufacturer of "Gloves for All Reasons" and in response to industry trends, WRP has been expanding its products targeted to non-medical niche markets, both internally and through a series of acquisitions. In addition the Group owns and operates the only private commercial radiation sterilisation facility in Malaysia. Given these products and activities, WRP believes that it offers a broader product range of hand protection and contamination control products than its competitors.

About Ecquaria

Ecquaria provides leading edge E-commerce products and solutions targeted at the B2B and B2C space - built entirely on Java and XML technologies.

Ecquaria licenses its ecBeans suite of Adaptable Business Components and Applications for the quick development and deployment of customer-centric solutions.

ecBeans product suite includes:

• Core-ecBeans - a foundation of core components such as security and access control manager, workflow manager, profile manager, audit trail manager, multi-channel delivery manager, connection manager, user and group manager, data manager, report generation manager, notification manager and content manager that are reusable across different E-commerce applications and vertical solutions.
• APP-ecBeans - vertical applications and solutions that ride on the CORE-ecBeans foundation.
• ChannelBeans - an e-commerce demand chain management solution that enables distributors and manufacturers to manage and sell to their channel of distributors, resellers and corporate customers.
• MerchantBeans - a B2C APP-ecBeans targeted at single and multi-merchants who want to sell their goods and services online to consumers.