Northern Light Announces SinglePoint 4.0 Market Research Portal

New release of hosted content integration application delivers single-search
access to market research across diverse primary and secondary sources;
enhances user experience with new personalization and ease of use features

CAMBRIDGE, MA, July 16, 2007 - Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) today introduced SinglePoint™ 4.0, the latest release of its hosted market research portal and content integration application. Single Point delivers single-search, unified access to an organization's full range of research content, whether that content is generated internally or licensed from third-party sources such as industry analysts.

SinglePoint is the only turn-key enterprise search application that provides centralized search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence. Northern Light aggregates all targeted content daily for each SinglePoint client - internal research, secondary sources, and licensed material - indexes it, and makes it available for unified access. Offered in a secure, hosted, user self-service portal environment, SinglePoint is customized to the precise market research and competitive intelligence purposes of each of Northern Light's enterprise clients. SinglePoint users number in the hundreds of thousands of planning, research, sales, marketing and finance professionals at top companies in each major technology sector of the Fortune 1000.

SinglePoint 4.0 enhancements
SinglePoint 4.0 enhancements address three critical areas of functionality: personalization, ease of use, and system administration. For example, SinglePoint 4.0 lets each user create a personalized home page by adding:

• headline feeds based on custom search queries;
• alerts delivered via e-mail or RSS feeds;
• "My Favorite" analyst research and news by topic, source or author.

Using these mechanisms, users can distill only the most relevant content from the entire body of market research and news sources to which they have access.

Ease of use in SinglePoint 4.0 has been enhanced by offering preconfigured "Expert Searches" created by professional editors based on an organization's information priorities. Also available to users is a comprehensive research vendor database, so with one click a user can ascertain under their organization's policies how to acquire a piece of research to which they may not automatically have access.

For administrators, SinglePoint 4.0 offers a greatly expanded set of usage monitoring and reporting facilities, which among other things enable accurate research subscription ROI assessments and internal charge-backs. In addition, administrators can easily communicate information of general interest to all users throughout their organization using announcement boxes that automatically appear on each user's home page; and they can instantly identify, assign and change users' research access privileges based on shifting short-term needs and organizational priorities.

Additionally, SinglePoint 4.0 is the platform from which users can access MI Analyst, Northern Light's text analytics application designed specifically to help SinglePoint customers extract business meaning from market research and market intelligence. By combining best-in-class, free-text searching with advanced text analytics, MI Analyst speeds and improves a researcher's ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.

"SinglePoint´s new personalization features have a direct impact on user satisfaction with our portal," said Rebecca Pollock, Global Analyst Services Manager at SAP. "Users find the research headlines helpful in tracking information for their research projects and like being able to set search defaults that fit the way they personally conduct searches. As the SinglePoint manager at SAP, I appreciate tools that foster user self-service. Furthermore, the detailed usage reporting I receive allows me to work more effectively with secondary research companies and provides meaningful feedback to management. Together, these features increase the perceived value of the portal and decrease the amount of time I need to spend supporting it."

Hosted application and managed service for market research content
Central to SinglePoint´s value proposition is the fact that Northern Light has agreements in place with all of the IT analyst firms and secondary sources used by its clients today. The company manages the legal requirements and operational idiosyncrasies of each individual information vendor in order to be able to aggregate, integrate, and index all new content from all sources on a daily basis.

"SinglePoint is a managed service squared," C. David Seuss, Northern Light´s CEO, said. "Not only do we manage the technology required to deliver a valuable application to our customers, we also manage their unique relationships with research firms like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and dozens of others. We ensure that each SinglePoint client continually receives the research material they´ve licensed, and (critical to the research vendors) only the specific material to which each client is contractually entitled. That´s a daunting data management task, for which Northern Light proudly boasts a perfect record."

Pricing and availability
SinglePoint 4.0 is available immediately from Northern Light. The pricing for unlimited enterprise-wide access to SinglePoint is based upon the number of market research sources a company wants integrated into its portal, starting at $50,000 annually. There is also a one-time set-up fee that begins at $50,000 for customization of the solution to a client´s requirements.

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About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996. During that time, Northern Light has built and deployed over 200 custom research portals and enterprise search applications for large enterprises. Northern Light´s clients include one or more of the top five companies in each major technology sector of the Fortune 1000. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a development center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Northern Light Group LLC is a profitable, privately-held, self-funded company with more than 50 employees.