WEBM Webmediabrands (MM)

Subsequent Elimination of Redundant, Manual Data Entry Expected to Streamline Customer Operations, Producing 100,000 Hour Gain in Workforce Productivity FAIRFAX, Va., Oct. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- webMethods Inc. (NASDAQ:WEBM), a leading business integration and optimization software company, today announced that First Tennessee Bank, a U.S. commercial banking institution and subsidiary of financial services company First Horizon National Corporation (NYSE:FHN), is implementing webMethods Glue to create Web services-based interoperability between critical operating systems. By making crucial business processes more readily available via Web services, First Tennessee Bank expects to be able to improve the level of efficiency and productivity of its workforce, as well as the quality of service the company provides to its customers. "Utilizing Web services to simplify and standardize the way data is moved so it can be used more efficiently and reliably has been a priority for us because it allows us to improve our internal processes and enhance our service levels," said Randall Carrier, executive vice president and director of customer knowledge for First Horizon National Corporation. "The development team initially used Tomcat and SOAP to manually create these Web services but quickly realized that we needed a product that would help us achieve the levels of speed, reuse and interoperability that we needed for the best performance. webMethods Glue was the most complete offering we found and one of the few to offer the high levels of customer support that webMethods provides." webMethods Glue is an easy-to-use development environment for creating and deploying applications using Web services, JavaServer Pages (JSPs) and servlets. A particularly important capability of webMethods Glue is the ability to transform existing Java(TM) application logic into standards- compliant Web services with no changes to the underlying code. Through this approach, First Tennessee Bank is able to use Web services to eliminate redundant data entry requirements across multiple disparate systems with the bank expecting to realize a 100,000 hour gain in workforce productivity as a result. Working with webMethods Glue, developers can easily create SOAP interfaces for their existing Java and other applications. webMethods Glue supports the latest Web services standards, including SOAP 1.2, WS-I and WS-Security, as well as JAX-RPC and JAZ-M, and offers interoperability with other WS-I compliant web services, and between JMS clients and non-JMS clients. Its powerful capabilities and ease of use enable companies to take their service- oriented architectures to the next level rapidly and cost-effectively. "A service-oriented approach to computing offers significant, long-term benefits through the expanded and simplified reuse of application functionality," said Guljit Khurana, vice president, Web Services Product Development, webMethods. "However, it also entails additional upfront costs and planning. By reducing this cost and complexity, webMethods Glue provides Global 2000 enterprises with significant value as it allows them to more quickly and easily populate their service-oriented architectures with readily invoked Web services. This means that their time-to-benefit can be significantly reduced. Going a step further, they can then leverage our flagship product suite, webMethods Fabric(TM), as their total solution for SOA, delivering such key features as registry, security, Web services management and business process management and optimization in a fully integrated product suite." To download a free, fully functional evaluation of webMethods Glue please visit: http://www.webmethods.com/Evaluate. About First Horizon The 13,000 employees of First Horizon National Corp. (NYSE:FHN) provide financial services to individuals and business customers through hundreds of offices located in more than 40 states. The corporation's three major brands -- FTN Financial, First Horizon and First Tennessee -- provide customers with a broad range of products and services including: * Capital markets, one of the nation's top underwriters of U.S. government agency securities * Mortgage banking, one of the nation's top 20 mortgage originators and top 15 servicers, which earned a top-10 ranking in customer satisfaction from J.D. Power and Associates * Retail/commercial banking, with the largest market share in Tennessee and one of the highest customer retention rates of any bank in the country FHN companies have been recognized as some of the nation's best employers by AARP, Working Mother and Fortune magazines. FHN also was named one of the nation's 100 best corporate citizens by Business Ethics magazine. More information can be found at http://www.fhnc.com/. About webMethods Inc. webMethods (NASDAQ:WEBM) provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and optimize available IT assets to drive business process productivity. webMethods delivers an innovative, enterprise-class business integration platform that incorporates proven integration technology with next generation capabilities into one interoperable set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency, agility and control. webMethods combines industry leadership with a zealous commitment to customers to deliver tangible business value to more than 1,300 global customers. webMethods is headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan. More information about the company can be found at http://www.webmethods.com/. The webMethods name and logo are registered trademarks, and webMethods Fabric is a trademark, of webMethods, Inc. All other marks mentioned are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies. DATASOURCE: webMethods, Inc. CONTACT: John Conley of webMethods Inc., +1-703-460-5996, Web site: http://www.webmethods.com/ http://www.fhnc.com/

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