Vertical*i and Inova Announce Merger

One Company Provides the Only Integrated Suite to Turn Innovation Opportunities into Performing Assets.

NEW YORK & LYON, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vertical*i, Inc. and Inova SA today announced they have entered into a merger agreement effective December 6, 2010. The combined company will be known as Inova Software Inc, in North America and Inova Software, SA in Europe.

“Today’s announcement is a key element of Inova Software’s strategy to drive value and immediately provide the market with a collaborative and agile innovation solution for businesses”

The merger will combine Vertical*i’s leadership in Business Development and Alliance Management software with Inova’s recognized expertise in Strategic Innovation software. The combined software suite consists of three primary modules: Inova for R&D (Research and Development), Inova for BD&L (Business Development and Licensing), and Inova for CFO. By expanding the combined companies’ strategy to provide an integrated software suite, Inova now allows customers to leverage innovation opportunities in and outside the company, and turn these opportunities into performing assets. The new company will immediately broaden efforts to sell to the Life Sciences and Consumer Packaged Goods Industry.

“Today’s announcement is a key element of Inova Software’s strategy to drive value and immediately provide the market with a collaborative and agile innovation solution for businesses,” said Gilles Toulemonde, Chief Executive Officer of Inova Software.

The merger will accelerate the use of Vertical*i’s end-to-end solution for decision-makers. The solution is an ideal component for fast, efficient business transactions because customers gain increased responsiveness and accountability, more time for value added partnering activities and better-informed decision-making. The joined companies will also leverage Inova’s unique Enrichment Technology. By matching, sorting, and grouping ideas and insights, the Enrichment Technology intelligently discovers innovation "hot spots" in a business’ knowledge base. Furthermore, by tracking each person’s interests and expertise, the Enrichment Technology connects innovators from across an organization to form powerful collaboration networks and allows customers to build catalogues of winning idea proposals. The merger brings the advantage to achieve full-scale, innovation lifecycle management solutions to any innovative business industry.

“We increasingly found that many of our customers’ game-changing ideas required some components to be sourced from outside the company,” said Gilles Toulemonde. “As we have built more functionality into our suite to support the ongoing partnerships that our customers forge; it became apparent that the enrichment capabilities available in the Inova suite would serve to enhance the ability to collaborate more on innovations with their alliance partners, which helps to solidify them as Partner-of-Choice in an increasingly competitive environment,” Hansruedi Kottmann, CEO of Vertical*i and now President of Inova Software Inc.

Many industries are looking to mitigate high-cost, high-risk and ineffective organizational structures to come up with the best innovation opportunities. Fluidity of markets, the informed consumer, disruptive business models, all demand rethinking innovation as a core business activity to compete for the future. Inova is the first provider to offer an innovation solution, from linking strategic intent to the innovation value chain, to measurable performance of the resulting assets.

For additional information about Inova Software, please contact Channasa Taylor, [e-mail] or visit the Internet at www.inova-software.com.

About Vertical*i

Vertical*i (www.verticali.com), founded in 1999, has helped over 40% of the top 50 Pharmaceutical companies streamline their business development and alliance management operations. Vertical*i’s comprehensive set of software tools are widely used by companies to scout, source, compare, and evaluate licensing and M&A opportunities and manage the resulting alliances’ commitments and relationships. In addition to the Life Sciences industry, Consumer Packaged Goods companies like Procter & Gamble utilize Vertical*i’s solution to “crowdsource” new innovations from outside the company through branded websites, such as P&G’s Connect+Develop^tm portal.

About Inova

Founded in 2001 by Gilles Toulemonde, CEO and David Carteret, Chief Innovation Officer, Inova (www.inova-software.com) has helped organizations around the world achieve their full innovation potential by providing a software platform that let them easily source, enrich and manage innovative ideas and other intangible assets. Inova’s unique Enrichment Technology has promoted the discovery of people, ideas and insights within organizations that would ordinarily have remained hidden due to cultural and organizational barriers as well as other factors. Deployed in over 35 firms, Inova’s suite has helped companies achieve dramatic increases in the quantity and quality of ideas that result in implemented innovations. One in four of the top 100 European companies have selected Inova to achieve its innovative business plans. As a result, the Inova Suite operates with 600,000+ users daily.