SureStock, a leading provider of Procurement software, today announced the launch of a new hosting service to be delivered by PIPEX Communications. The company's Procurement Workbench™ consists of eight Procurement software products that can be used individually or in any combination to address almost all phases of the Procurement life-cycle. The hosting service will enable customers to use these products as a service over the Internet with almost unlimited scalability, robust resilience, exceptional availability and fast response time. The service builds on a smaller scale offering that has been in production for the last five years and servicing around 3,000 end users.

Following a year-long competition, SureStock selected PIPEX Communications as its hosting provider. PIPEX is one of the largest providers of managed and supported hosting solutions, with datacentre facilities in London, Manchester and Leeds. All datacentres are connected to PIPEX's fast and resilient network and are manned 24x7 by a team of specialist engineers. SureStock plans to have all its current customers moved to PIPEX's London data centre by the end of January 2005 and to host all of its future customers there.

“Moving to PIPEX will enable SureStock to deliver its procurement applications with dramatically improved scalability and reliability. In the next few years, our growth forecasts indicate that we will be supporting over 50,000 end-users and we have no doubt we can do that at PIPEX. In addition, we continue to see a trend towards hosted delivery rather than licenced software in both the public and private sectors in the UK, as well as in the EU and Middle East. Finally, the new hosting service will provide a solid platform for our managed procurement teams who deliver procured products and services to our customers with ever increasing value for money” said Richard Haynes, Managing Director of SureStock.

“PIPEX is delighted to be working with SureStock. Organisations such as the National Health Service are reliant on having always-available procurement applications. Combining the software expertise of SureStock with the scalable, resilient and high performing infrastructure of PIPEX means that we can achieve just that” said Mike Read, Chief Executive Officer, PIPEX Communications.

Established in 1997, SureStock is a leading provider of award-winning managed procurement services, procurement software, training and consulting. The company is headquartered in Oxford, UK and employs over 70 people, the majority of whom have extensive procurement expertise.

Since its founding, the company has delivered over 200 person years of managed procurement services, conducted 2,000 tender exercises and processed over 3 million order lines. SureStock currently handles over £100M in influenceable spend.

For more information on SureStock, please visit www.surestock.co.uk or call 01865 384538.

PIPEX is a telecom network operator and provider of broadband solutions that combines the best infrastructure, services, support and people to make communications simple for businesses. A highly respected tier one Internet Service Provider (ISP), PIPEX Communications provides both voice and data connectivity solutions, helping organisations to keep their lines of communication open.

Established in 1991, PIPEX was the UK's first commercial ISP, set up to deliver affordable, high speed, high quality corporate Internet access. Now owning one of the UK's most extensive communication networks, PIPEX has data centres in London, Manchester and Leeds and over 100 Points of Presence (PoPs) nation-wide.

The company has achieved and retained an enviable customer list, ranging from SMEs to blue chip companies and including two-thirds of the UK's top 100 companies (as listed by The Times).

For more information on PIPEX, please visit www.pipex.net or call 08000 317 317.

SureStock provides a family of software tools that cover the entire procurement life-cycle. These include e-procurement, e-tendering, bid evaluation and supplier management. ContractX joins this family as the central repository for all contract-related data and the functions to process it. "Contract management is a critical application in all parts of SureStock's business. We searched for a year for a fully EU-compliant product and have spent the last six months competing the products we found. ContractX is by far the most advanced EU-compliant product available and Symfact has extensive experience in this area. We are therefore delighted to have forged this partnership" said Richard Haynes, Managing Director of SureStock.

Further information.

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