For Immediate Release

Emeryville, CA. February 12, 2001 - TechniCon Corporation, a leading provider of e-Commerce software solutions for manufacturing industries, and Hawk Ridge Systems, a leading reseller of CAD software solutions to west coast manufacturers, today announced a strategic alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, Hawk Ridge will resell TechniCon's CustomCommerce software suite to strategic manufacturers in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

"TechniCon is very pleased to have Hawk Ridge as a reseller for our e-Commerce solutions," said Jim Osberg, VP of Sales. "This will give us strong marketing and engineering support, while offering Hawk Ridge a great sales avenue into larger manufacturers who want to sell their products over the Internet."

"We've historically been very selective about adding new solutions, but TechniCon's CustomCommerce is a natural fit," states Steve Wilcox, President of Hawk Ridge Systems. "HRS's partnership with TechniCon provides our customers with an integrated path to leverage the SolidWorks solid model from engineering into product selection, drastically reducing the time necessary to configure and sell their products."

CustomCommerce is TechniCon's next-generation electronic commerce solution specifically designed for highly variable products. The software provides manufacturers, resellers, procurement vendors and Internet content providers with a powerful electronic commerce system, including Legacy-to-Web product definition tools, easy-to-use product selection methods and interactive product visualization.

CustomCommerce integrates a number of key technologies, including parametric and solution-based product selection, collaborative filtering, 3D product visualization and personalization, in order to simplify the sale of complex, highly variable products. The software includes TechniCon's proprietary Legacy-to-Web tools, which leverage manufacturers' CAD based, legacy product data-including product descriptions, prices and graphics-and re-purposes them for online applications, ensuring the data is Internet compatible and e-Commerce friendly. Based on open standards, such as XML, CustomCommerce also supplies companies with a Web-ready product database that easily integrates with other applications, including popular online procurement and ERP systems.

Another key feature is advanced CustomCommerce product visualization. Once a list of compatible products is obtained, buyers simply click on a component name to view either a detailed drawing or interactive 3D model of the product. The dynamic 3D model, which is parametrically generated from the buyer's specified options, allows the customer to fully rotate, tilt and size the component, creating a comprehensive view of the customized product.

TechniCon is also a SolidWorks, 3D Partstream publishing partner.

By reducing the complexities of configuring and ordering highly variable products, CustomCommerce shortens the sales cycle and reduces costs while it expands a company's sales over the Internet.

TechniCon Corporation is a leading provider of electronic commerce solutions for highly variable products. The company's advanced CustomCommerce software combines dynamic product selection, configuration and visualization technology to help customers narrow the field of options and simplify the purchase of complex products. By allowing buyers to select, configure, visualize and order highly variable products directly over the Internet, CustomCommerce dramatically shortens the sales cycle, thus increasing vendor profitability and customer satisfaction. TechniCon (www.technicon.com) is located in Emeryville, California.

Hawk Ridge Systems is one of the country's leading CAD providers and the largest SolidWorks dealer in the North America. Founded in 1995 in the San Francisco Bay area, the company posted record growth of 162% for the year 2000. Today, it has six offices and a territory that extends from southern California to Seattle, Washington. Hawk Ridge has twelve full time engineers on staff, and maintains a 2:1 ratio of engineers to sales people-more than double the industry norm. This heavy investment in customer support, plus an array of industry-leading products including SolidWorks, Activault and COSMOS/Works has attracted hundreds of west coast customers. (www.hawkridgesys.com)

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