BOSTON, MA – September 2, 1998 – VNP Software, Inc., a leading financial services system integrator, and Athena Design, Inc., maker of Integer, the world’s highest performance spreadsheet server, announced a distribution and technical partnership today.

Athena Design, Inc. will supply VNP with The Integer Spreadsheet Server and direct-to-engineer support. VNP Software will integrate The Integer Spreadsheet Server into a series of vertical software development projects in the financial services industry. VNP will take advantage of Integer’s real-time data feeds, database access, arbitrary objects in spreadsheet cells, and high-performance multi-threaded recalculation capabilities.

"Our partnership with Athena Design will allow us to deliver higher quality, easier to use, object-oriented solutions to our customers in record time," said Ronald V. Simmons, President of VNP. "The ability to put advanced financial analytics in spreadsheet files and distribute the results across an enterprise from a high availability, managed server in real time allows us to rapidly build a completely new class of applications. We expect that our customers will be thrilled with the new products that we will deliver on the Integer platform."

"VNP has a depth of experience with object-oriented systems," said David Pollak, President, Athena Design, Inc. "Working with their engineers, we are able to continue to grow the Integer Spreadsheet Server to meet the needs and demands of a wide variety of customers. We look forward to working with them to deliver great products."

Integer is a scalable, high performance spreadsheet server. It enables users to collaborate on spreadsheet in real-time, access huge spreadsheets in record time and calculate real-time data from multiple sources over Intranets, Extranets, and the Internet. Integer imports and exports Excel and 1-2-3 spreadsheets, accesses real-time data from virtually any source including Reuters, accessed relational databases, and has the fastest recalculation speed of any leading spreadsheet. Integer runs on any Java 1.1 platform.