WEB DSIGNSHOP MARKS 10,000 STORE MILESTONE
AccessVia's sign and display solutions now licensed in 40,000 stores as company continues to dominate
among the world's top retailers

SEATTLE, January 13, 2006 — AccessVia®, the leading provider of automated sign printing solutions and electronic display technologies for retailers, today announced that Web dSignShop® has been deployed in 10,000 stores – a milestone indicating a significant acceleration in its market dominance just two years after introducing the Web–based sign printing software. Over 40,000 stores are now licensed to use AccessVia solutions for sophisticated in–store visual merchandising and advanced signing capabilities.

Today, nearly half of the nation’s top 15 retailers use AccessVia products. Global 500 enterprises all over the world have turned to AccessVia as the only company with a comprehensive approach to retail data presentation. Among the company’s offerings are Web dSignShop, which enables instant sign production featuring real-time corporate data; dSIGN®, a solution for client/server architectures; and AccessVia Display, a platform for delivering rich-media electronic content for digital signs, POS displays, kiosks, and more.

“We're celebrating 40,000 success stories-that seems like a good opportunity to reflect a bit on our collective accomplishments,” says AccessVia CEO Dean A. Sleeper. “We've assembled a truly talented team here, and are so grateful to have worked with some phenomenal clients. When we got started in this business, desktop publishing had just been invented just down the street at Aldus and retailers were struggling to publish huge reservoirs of data-price information, item features, sales and promotions.”

Eric Bedell, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing continues, “The missing element was a vehicle for bringing the design strengths of publishing software to the volume publishing requirements of retail. Most importantly it needed to be highly automated to accommodate all that constantly changing data. We set out to figure out how to publish that data in a timely, attractive, useful way. We not only gave retailers a way to do that, we also gave them a way to distribute that capability to every store, every computer, all the time. That’s a valuable answer to a need that spans every retail sector, which is why we’re now doing business with everyone from Safeway to Harley-Davidson.”

That record of innovation led to perhaps the most significant product advance in the company's history-the ability to deliver on-demand sign printing via the Web. “The introduction of Web dSignShop was a major leap for visual merchandising, and I think retailers grasped that immediately,” says Jonathon Moulton, AccessVia's chief product officer of the product's 10,000 store milestone. “Instantly-without installing any store software, without paying licensing fees, without endless rounds of upgrades and downloads-stores were able to print smart-looking, data-customized signs with just their Web-connected PC and printer. It is a whole new level of flexibility, brand management, and publishing performance. Offering it on a subscription basis also made it accessible to virtually any enterprise”

Extending that broad appeal is a technology model that enables AccessVia products to plug in immediately and adapt to literally any data configuration. “We've had clients who are up and running within a matter of days,” says Lorelie Kaid, AccessVia's vice president of customer solutions. AccessVia solutions connect with a retailer's existing databases, eliminating long development and implementation cycles. Well-designed interfaces mean that AccessVia products, once deployed, remain low-impact, high-yield assets in all kinds of retail environments. “For our products to succeed in 40,000 stores, they have to handle tremendous complexity and volume but also be completely intuitive for the store staff,” Kaid continues. She credits automated features and sophisticated template authoring at headquarters for helping even high-turnover stores to create professional-quality signs quickly and easily.

Sleeper says that taking the long view of retailing’s future has helped AccessVia to deliver products that are agile enough to integrate with technologies just now on the horizon. “With our solutions, retailers can respond to conditions that change hour by hour. But they're also facing long-term structural changes in the market and in technology. It's not enough to design a product for what's happening now. Our solutions are built on a nimble delivery mechanism and open standards so our customer's are making money with our solutions fast and ready to enable what's next.”

What's next, as Sleeper sees it, is a world of data delivery where the retailer's message has unprecedented reach and pinpoint specificity. Instant access to data and design assets will give even small retailers sophisticated branding and customer communication abilities. Electronic display devices allow retailers to approach consumers with tailored messages and personalized offers. “The future will require retailers to communicate with their customers in an ever-expanding set of different contexts. On paper or displays, retailers will speak with their customers in the store, at home and in-between. What we are dreaming and building is a seamless delivery platform that allows a retailer to view all of these contexts in a single way. We build systems that allow retailers to design, control and publish their message on any device, anywhere in the world. We're on the leading edge of these ventures and well positioned for future growth-not just in terms of winning more customers, but in terms of growing with the customers we have,” says Sleeper. “Forty-thousand success stories is a great start…but just a start.”

AccessVia has won recognition including the RIS Retail Software Leaderboard of the top 45 Software Vendors in Retail and was voted by retailers as being one of the top ten vendors for strategic value and performance, quality of support and service, and ease of upgrading. In addition, AccessVia has repeatedly been awarded Microsoft's Retail Application Developer (RAD) Award for North America and EMEA. For over 20 years, AccessVia has produced platform independent, open-standard solutions for retailers and is proud to partner with retail technology leaders such as 360Commerce, Connect3, HP, IBM, and Microsoft.

The AccessVia Print solution includes both Web dSignShop and dSIGNŽ to provide clients with accurate and attractive signs, shelf-edge labels, fact tags, coupons, and more. Web dSignShop is designed for retailers who want to use the Internet, an intranet, or an extranet to publish signs using a Web browser without installing or maintaining in-store software. dSIGN is built for classic client/server implementations and offers advanced product data delivery and unmatched integration with legacy systems.

AccessVia also offers a solution for automated electronic displays, including digital signs, customer-facing POS displays, self-service terminals, and kiosk applications for price verification, assisted shopping, endless aisle services,
and gift registry.

AccessVia customers include Bed Bath & Beyond, Kroger, LCBO, Petco, Safeway, Staples, SUPERVALU,
Target, and Walgreens.

About AccessVia, Inc.
AccessVia takes retailers beyond price point to a place where they can truly connect with customers at the moment of choice. Smart consumers expect more than flashing lights and red type. The new consumer requires new messaging.

AccessVia Consumer Messaging Optimization Services help you to envision that future and make it happen. Seasoned retail professionals, armed with best practices, industry benchmarks and new ideas, work with your team to transform your consumer messaging effectiveness and efficiency. AccessVia Publishing Platform solutions provide the software tools to extend your retail brand promise to the Last Mile – where the customer chooses to browse or buy.

Create new business processes for the future then manage your publishing systems with software being used today by Global 500 companies in over 40,000 retail stores. Take your customers beyond price point with AccessVia.

For more information contact:
For AccessVia
Gaylene C. Meyer
206-285-4994 x150