June 15, 2006 Richardson, TX – IDG’s CIO magazine has recognized KnowledgeBase Marketing with the 2006 CIO 100 award.  Every year the CIO 100 Awards honor companies around the world that use information technology in innovative and strategic ways. The awards are judged by CIO Magazine’s editorial staff who look for companies that demonstrate measurable results using IT to deliver business value, whether by creating a competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth or improving customer relationships.

According to Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO magazine, “Year after year, the CIO 100 award recipients serve as industry role models for business and IT excellence.  This year’s winners are particularly remarkable for their ability to translate IT innovation into business value and solid ROI.”

CIO magazine recognized KnowledgeBase Marketing for designing a grid-based, open system service-oriented architecture (SOA) to process core applications that improves processing time and decreases cost per transaction. The new system was designed to:

• Process at least 30 million transactions per hour.
• Provide fail-safe reliability with 99.999% uptime.
• Scale incrementally.
• Be a service-oriented architecture so that all systems, open or mainframe, have a single point of service.

The new system can process 40 million records per hour, up from 6 million records previously.  The system is scalable both horizontally and vertically and can adapt to any core software with API support.    Other benefits include an increase in total transaction capacity from 60 billion a year to 350 billion a year, an 87% decrease in transaction costs, and a drop in runtime per million records from 10 minutes to 1.5 minutes.

“We are truly honored to be included in the CIO 100,” says Gary S. Laben, CEO, KnowledgeBase Marketing.  “We recognized that we had to radically transform our processing infrastructure to meet the rapid growth in our business.  We are pleased to receive this recognition for our hard and creative work.  Special thanks go to our employees, Brian Camp, Gerald Poole, Steve Sims and James Swoopes for having the vision to design and implement a system that will benefit KnowledgeBase Marketing and our clients by providing much faster and cost effective turnaround times.”

KnowledgeBase Marketing will receive the award at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards ceremony to be held at the Hotel Del Coronado, Coronado, CA, August 20 – 22, 2006.

About the CIO 100 Awards

The recipients of this year’s CIO 100 award were selected through a three-step process. First, companies filled out an online application form detailing their innovative practices in both business and IT. Next, teams of CIO magazine editors and writers reviewed the applications in depth, looking for unique practices and substantial results. Finally, the teams met for a day-long meeting to debate the merits of each nominee and vote on the final 100. Once the top 100 honorees were selected, several honoreeswere chosen to receive an additional special award.

To provide a vision of ever-changing business trends, the focus of the CIO 100 changes annually. Complete coverage of the 2006 CIO 100 awards will be in the August 15 issue of CIO magazine and available online at www.cio.com on August 15.

About KnowledgeBase Marketing

KnowledgeBase Marketing provides information marketing and award-winning database marketing solutions that enable companies to acquire and manage profitable customer relationships across traditional and Web-based contact points. Using best-in-class tools and methodologies, we develop data-driven and profit-focused marketing strategies and solutions that empower our clients to make informed business decisions.  Over nearly 30 years, we have created a comprehensive world-class suite of marketing solutions that includes consumer and business data, advanced data processing, database marketing, analytics and strategic consulting. KnowledgeBase Marketing’s parent company, Wunderman, is a division of Young & Rubicam Brands and a member of the WPP Group. For more information, please visit www.knowledgebasemarketing.com.