Chicago (July 10, 2006) - Initiate Systems, Inc., the leading provider of software for creating the most complete, real-time views of data about people, households and organizations, today announced that Microsoft Corp. has deployed Initiate™ customer data integration (CDI) software for its Microsoft Individuals and Organizations (MIO) project to create an extremely accurate, high-performance transactional data hub that includes complete views of business-to-business (B2B) organizational hierarchies.

The MIO CDI project will completely transform Microsoft's global data infrastructure, so that information about an individual or organization is mastered once in a central hub to improve customer and partner satisfaction, as well as financial reporting and field productivity. Initiate Identity Hub™ software enables MIO to provide composite views of all organization data about customers, partners and suppliers, and deliver advanced, B2B hierarchy management.

Implemented in less than six months and deployed in late April, phase one of the project cross matches more than 28 million United States and Canadian organization data records from external master reference databases. By building on top of enterprise-class 64-bit products, such as SQL server 2005 and Windows Server 2003, MIO was able to process more than 1,150 transactions per second with less than 200 millisecond latency using a single server.

"We evaluated a number of other options, and Initiate Systems was the best CDI solution that could provide the B2B hierarchy management we needed and meet our accuracy, performance, and scalability requirements," said Tony Ulkekul, Senior Director, Sales Operations, Microsoft. "Initiate’s advanced matching technology, combined with its ability to integrate with enterprise-class Microsoft products, created a global solution for our CDI needs."

Initiate Systems developed a new B2B data stewardship prototype tool to support Microsoft's business requirements. The tool will be widely available this fall, providing search, retrieval, edit, visual hierarchy navigation and management and advanced compositing capabilities.

"Microsoft had a leading-edge vision to create a single trusted source within the company for its extremely complex data about individuals and organizations," said Bill Conroy, Initiate’s president and CEO. "With our proven solution, we were able to show them how to quickly and cost effectively build a highly scalable, real-time mastering application that provides them with the most accurate and complete data possible, across channels and the globe."

Initiate Identity Hub™ software is the most accurate, scalable, rapidly implemented and widely deployed customer data integration solution for organizations that want to create complete, real-time views of data from all applications and data sources. The software combines the ability to handle hundreds of millions of records in sub-second response times with unsurpassed matching and linking technology that identifies and resolves information routinely, even when there is duplicate, fragmented or incomplete data.

For more information on Initiate Systems, visit www.initiatesystems.com.