London — June 21, 2006—GXS, a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce solutions, today announced winners of its 2006 European Customer Awards Program. The program, which recognizes companies making innovative use of GXS' B2B e-commerce solutions, highlights winners across three distinct categories. GXS European Customer Award winners include large enterprises as well as a small and medium-sized business (SMB) customer. Award categories include "Best Contributions to Accelerating On-Demand Supply Chain Management" and "Best Use of Trading Grid to Enhance Supply Chain Efficiency." The award recipients are Azertia, Iceland Foods, Osram, Schenker AG, ST Microelectronics and Supply Direct.

Nominees for 2006 GXS Customer Awards were evaluated on a range of criteria by a panel of judges that included Ken Vollmer, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Clive Longbottom, senior director at Quocirca; and Rowland Archer, chief technology officer at GXS. Entrants were judged on ability to execute complex B2B e-commerce initiatives, enable trading partner participation in supply chain initiatives and enhanced supply chain efficiency enabled through the deployment of the GXS Trading Grid^®.

"In today's increasingly complex global business environment, companies constantly are challenged to integrate with trading partners, and to streamline their supply and demand chains for greater business process efficiencies," said Clive Longbottom of Quocirca. "These awards honor companies that have stood out in their efforts to leverage GXS' technology and create truly innovative B2B initiatives that impact their businesses' bottom lines and product delivery times. These winning companies stand out as models for other businesses to follow."

The 2006 European Enterprise Customer Award Winners and Award Categories were:

• Best Use of the GXS Trading Grid to Reduce Complexity in B2B e-Commerce – Awarded to the customers that masked the complexity of varying B2B e-commerce standards between diverse trading partner communities with the benefit of simplifying customer or supplier experiences.
  
  
  • ST Microelectronics (ST) – ST is a global independent semiconductor company based in France. ST leverages the GXS Trading Grid to connect to a wide range of trading partners worldwide, including a rapidly expanding trading network in the Asia Pacific region. Through use of the Trading Grid, 90 percent of ST's trading partners are electronically enabled, allowing the company to focus on core competencies and customers, rather than on the maintenance and integrity of its trading network.
  • Osram – Osram GmbH in Munich, Germany is the world's number one supplier of automotive lamps and LEDs, with 49 factories in 19 countries. Osram recognized that one single, integrated EDI infrastructure would improve sourcing and delivery to many locations and streamline the management of its diverse business partners' needs. Osram has automated a full range of electronic documents, including invoices, orders, amendments, acknowledgements, delivery advices and advanced ship notices with their partners, offering them a choice of formats via the GXS Trading Grid. As a result, Osram has been able to reduce their costs while offering consistently high quality service levels.
• Best Use of the GXS Trading Grid to Enhance Supply Chain Efficiency – Awarded to the customer that enhanced supply chain processes such as forecasting, procurement, logistics, invoicing or payment with quantifiable costs savings to operations.
  
  Enterprise Winners:
  
  
  • Schenker AG – Headquartered in Essen, Germany, Schenker AG is one of the world's leading providers of integrated logistics services. Schenker received this award in recognition of the Schenker Worldwide Online Real Time Data Network (SWORD). A long-time customer of GXS, Schenker has operated SWORD for more than 10 years and has worked closely with GXS to maintain and evolve SWORD which simplifies B2B e-commerce for its extensive customer base.
  • Iceland Foods – Iceland Foods, a European food retailer, uses multiple GXS services to streamline supply chain operations and connect to a broad array of trading partners of varying sizes and technological capabilities. By utilizing several GXS services including Global Messaging and hosted translation services, Iceland Foods can obtain critical business information from its trading partners without inconveniencing them or requiring additional investments in IT. As a result, Iceland Foods has achieved a stellar 100 percent adoption rate for the use of electronic documents within its trading partner community.
  SMB Winner:
  
  
  • Supply Direct – Supply Direct provides catering management services to schools, hospitals, care homes and other institutions. A long-time customer of GXS' EDI solutions, Supply Direct decided to implement GXS Application Integrator (AI), a powerful, intuitive data transformation software solution that simplifies data integration and enables easy and rapid communication with large trading communities. Through AI, Supply Direct plans to eliminate all of the manual processes involved in communicating with suppliers. This will leave employees free to dedicate more time to listening to customers' needs and improving business processes in other areas. Supply Direct is on track to reduce its amount of manual processes from 70 percent to just 30 percent by the end of 2006.
• Best Contribution to Accelerating On-Demand Supply Chain Management – Awarded to the customer that provides its trading partners with an on-demand e-commerce offering that extends the availability of rich functionality typically limited to those who could purchase expensive, software licenses.
  • Azertia – Azertia provides innovative, high-value IT solutions to multinational businesses in a variety of sectors including finance, public administration, utilities, telecommunications and industry. To serve the enterprise content management, business process outsourcing, digital strategy, security and data synchronization needs of its clients, the company developed a collaborative integration platform based on the GXS Trading Grid. This unique integration platform is tailored for customers and includes customized services and solutions based on each company's unique requirements.

GXS also conducted a Customer Awards program in North America. The winners of GXS' North American Customer Awards program are Penske Logistics, InFocus Corporation, Nygard International, Herman Kay and Monarch Towel.

"Recognizing that our customers continue to raise the bar for achieving outstanding B2B integration with their trading partners, we created this program to highlight those companies that went above and beyond traditional B2B e-commerce strategies and executed a truly innovative approach to supply chain management," said Rowland Archer of GXS. "The GXS Customer Awards Program demonstrates the business benefits corporations can receive, not only from the GXS Trading Grid, but also from the company's community enablement and SMB-specific services."

The GXS Trading Grid^® is GXS' unique global integration platform that enables and streamlines cross-enterprise business processes. The Trading Grid is the world's largest electronic business community, used by more than 40,000 trading partners every day to exchange goods and services. As a service-oriented architecture B2B platform, the Trading Grid helps customers automate global trading communities by shielding complexity from rapidly changing standards, eliminating manual and duplicative efforts and enabling a new level of process integration and business intelligence.

GXS is a leading global provider of B2B e-commerce solutions that simplify and enhance business process integration and collaboration. Organizations worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500, leverage the GXS Trading Grid^® to achieve the perfect balance between supply and demand. Active in the global standards arena, GXS enables customers both large and small, to connect with global partners, synchronize product information, optimize inventory levels and demand forecasts and accelerate the execution of supply chains.

Headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., GXS provides sales and support to businesses and their partners worldwide. For more information, visit our Web site at www.gxs.com.