Char Baxter, CEO
Char Baxter Communications
770.934.0563 ext. 221
email: cbaxter@charbaxter.com
web: www.charbaxter.com

charbaxter.communications Partners with Porter & Associates
Two Atlanta-Based IT Industry Leaders Join Forces

September 28, 2000 — Atlanta, GA — charbaxter.communications, a national advertising agency based in Atlanta, today announced a strategic alliance with Porter & Associates to offer market research services to small, high-growth and dotcom clients.

"This is an important step in the growth of our agency as we continue to broaden our bandwidth of services," said Char Baxter, CEO of the agency that provides integrated advertising and marketing services to technology and e-technology companies. "With the needs of the marketplace changing at Internet speed today, Porter & Associates can bring significant value to our clients in clearly identifying new targets for their marketing efforts. Our mission is to help clients expand marketshare and mindshare through proven brand-building strategies, and our partnership with Porter adds new tools to our war chest for accomplishing that mission."

Porter & Associates is an Atlanta-based research company serving the global IT marketplace. With a particularly high profile in the Atlanta area, Porter & Associates recently teamed with TechLINKS, a high-tech bimonthly magazine, to launch a web-based research series designed to provide answers to pertinent issues facing the fast-moving high tech industry in Georgia.

"We're delighted to add charbaxter.communications to our family of strategic partners," said Bill Porter, CEO of Porter and Associates. "It just makes good business sense for us to offer the agency's services to our clients as a rapid, quality way to put our research findings into action in the advertising and marketing arenas. And charbaxter.communications was the only logical choice. With the agency's unparalleled experience and brainpower in building brand strategies for companies in the same market as ours, we've teamed with the best in the business."

About Porter & Associates

Founded in 1989, Porter & Associates is a global market research organization that has provided B2B research to hundreds of IT industry companies worldwide over the last decade. In addition to providing the latest in Web and telephone-based surveys increasingly focused on areas like e-business, Porter offers state-of-the-art research products and services in two distinct areas: Primary Research for IT and Industry Research for IT. Porter's three core products for Primary Research include Customer Loyalty/Customer Relationship Management Analysis, Sales Decision Analysis and Market Opportunity Analysis. Through its Industry Research unit, Porter offers interview-based research studies for sale in emerging high-growth areas of IT, such as ASPs.

Porter's clients include companies like McKesson HBOC, 3Com, Nortel Networks, Deloitte Consulting, WebMD and many others. In Atlanta, Porter conducts a bimonthly web survey with TechLINKS called ePoll to find what Georgia IT companies are doing in areas like employee retention, partnering and branding. In 1996, the company published the widely distributed Quest For Loyalty, a seminal work on employee loyalty, customer loyalty and customer profitability in the IT marketplace. Porter & Associates can be reached at 800-755-9892 or at www.porterassociates.com.

About charbaxter.communications

Founded in 1991, charbaxter.communications worked with SAP America, Deloitte Consulting and Imlay Investments, then developed award-winning branding strategies for more and more technology leaders across North America. Clients included Sequent Computer Systems, Portland, OR; I•Cube, a Cambridge, MA-based company that was recently acquired by Razorfish; Dallas-based i2 Technologies; Clarkston•Potomac, Raleigh; and Atlanta-based companies such as SQL Financials (now Clarus), SynQuest, Inc., Optio Software and Manhattan Associates.

Today the agency's clients range from startups to established players including Ockham Technologies, Atlanta, GA; Synermedics, Atlanta, GA; MindLever, Raleigh, NC; and Magnet Communications, Atlanta, GA. charbaxter.communications closed 1999 with over $3 million in billings and a full-time team of 15 employees. The agency is a member of the Technology Association of Georgia.