Press Release: Specialty Catalog Chooses Taurus for Improved Effectiveness

REDWOOD CITY, CA, January 10, 2006. Specialty Catalog, Inc., America’s foremost retailer of wigs and hairpieces, today announced their choice of Taurus Software’s Ecomedate to boost productivity and effectiveness by unlocking production data for non-IT users.

"Currently, 80% of the effort is spent getting the data," says Bob Brennan, Specialty’s IT director, "while only 20% is spent analyzing the data. We want the reverse. Ideally, our IT staff will get out of the report writing business entirely. And we think Ecomedate is the key to letting us do it."

According to Brennan, Specialty users keep a significant amount of information in spreadsheets and files, spending up to three hours a day aggregating data from these sources and several smaller reports into larger ones. By unifying production and non-production data into a single view, and making it more accessible, Ecomedate will eliminate much of that work.

In fact, with the help of Ecomodate, Specialty now plans merging data from a multitude of sources-the order entry system, distribution system and phone switch into a data warehouse capable of providing a consolidated view of their entire business, and helping them answer questions like, "How many mail order customers called the service center today?"-mission-critical concerns once impossible to address.

And Brennan makes another important note. "Since our production systems are reserved for running the business, we can’t produce many reports during the day. Moving analysis and reporting to a separate database with Ecomedate will let users do what they want without impacting production. That’s a huge benefit for us."

"We’re thrilled to have Specialty Catalog as a customer," says Steve Jackson, Manager of Development at Taurus Software. "Their business is so important to so many people. And we’re doubly happy to help them manage it better."

About Specialty Catalog

Specialty Catalog Corp. is the nation's leading direct marketer of women's wigs and hair pieces, offering a broad range of comfortable, stylish products at affordable prices. They serve the fashion and medical needs of women each year through catalog marketing, Web sites and operations in the United States and UK.

About Taurus Software

Taurus Software has been making data liquid for clients since 1987. Taurus products include DataBridger-a powerful tool for complete bi-directional connectivity between MPE, LINUX, NT and UNIX systems, plus Ecomedate-a turnkey retail business intelligence solution.

Taurus is also a member of the HP e3000 Transition Partners Program.

For complete information and a white paper on DataBridger, call 650-482-2022 Ext. 1.