Migrated Application to Support Linux Environment; Help Local Government Realize Maintenance and Cost Efficiencies

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2006, CANNES, France — Nov. 6, 2006 — BluePhoenix Solutions (NASDAQ: BPHX - News), the leader in Enterprise IT Modernization, today announced that it has been selected by the IT department of the Swiss Kanton Solothurn to migrate the local government's Konsul core business process application from PowerBuilder to Java.

"The BluePhoenix-led migration effort will provide us with simplified maintenance, increased interoperability and reduced costs," said Kurt Bader, director of IT of Solothurn. "In addition, our overhead costs will considerably diminish because we will no longer need to maintain multiple platforms. The migrated application will help us enhance and protect the long-term investment that Solothurn has put into Konsul."

The Konsul application is a key business application that Solothurn uses to automate, manage and control important government processes such as documenting the specifics of a new law or managing best practices information. Konsul helps increase collaboration across the various departments and improve the efficiency of individual operations. While realizing great benefits from Konsul, the Swiss Kanton Solothurn's IT department determined it needed to minimize IT costs and vendor dependencies by increasing its use of open source technologies such as Linux. It therefore needed to address Konsul, which does not run in a Linux environment.

Currently, the Konsul application is PC-based and used by 450 people in over 100 different offices. This means that if a change needs to be made to the application, it must be updated on 40 terminal servers. Once BluePhoenix Solutions migrates the application to its new environment, Konsul will reside in one centralized HP server and users will access the program through web-based software.

"The Kanton of Solothurn is serving as role model to Switzerland's other 25 Kantons on how to migrate proprietary PowerBuilder applications into an open environment provided by Java," said Reinhard Wetzel, regional vice president of Central and Eastern Europe at BluePhoenix Solutions. "With nearly 20 years of experience modernizing applications for Global 5,000 companies worldwide, BluePhoenix is thrilled that Solothurn chose us to provide these automated migration services. Our intent is to deliver the migrated Konsul application with full business logic, data integrity retention, minimal downtime and maximum end-user transparency."