ACUNIA Receives Frost & Sullivan Award for Automotive Telematics Market

    SAN JOSE, Calif.--April 25, 2001--Frost & Sullivan announces ACUNIA is a recipient of the prestigious 2001 Entrepreneurial Company Award for its unique third-generation product solution for the global telematics market.
    ACUNIA pioneered the synergistic concept of the Open Telematics Framework (OTF). Uniquely operated from the same platform, car and truck manufacturers, insurance companies, motoring and travel club organizations, leasing and rental companies and public authorities can constantly refine and upgrade their service packages and develop new products. These services will have a spectacular impact on the life of car and truck owners, and help manage traffic problems and growing traffic congestion.
    According to new market information from Frost & Sullivan, "European Automotive Telematics Market for Hardware Systems and Services," the key to unlocking profits within the telematics sphere will depend on delivering the services that end-users want. A critical opportunity for the automotive telematics industry will be to optimize service revenues from each end-user throughout the entire life of a vehicle.
    The imperative is to build flexibility into systems from the outset to allow delivery services that will emerge in the future. A key aspect of ACUNIA's technology is it facilitates telematics services or transactions regardless of the technological framework in the vehicle.
    "ACUNIA's entrepreneurial success is based on two factors. The first is the unique technology; the second is the vision and drive of the management team to unleash the profit potential of that technology. These factors will surely propel ACUNIA to the forefront of the automotive telematics arena," says Tif Awan, Frost & Sullivan industry analyst.
    The Frost & Sullivan Market Engineering Entrepreneurial Company Award is bestowed to companies demonstrating superior entrepreneurial ability within their industry. Award recipients must meet specific criteria such as identifying a unique product solution with significant market potential within the next two to five years.
    To date in 2001, ACUNIA has established their U.S. office in Detroit, a European office in Frankfurt and secured financing from Infineon Ventures. ACUNIA has launched XINGU (an embedded Java processing solution), is partnering with General Motors for its future telematics service deployment in Europe, and the BMW Group (within the scope of the Inform-project) supplementing their Connected Drive strategy.
    ACUNIA is a participant of the Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration (AMI-C) and chairs the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) consortium. ACUNIA is heavily involved in validation programs with several industry leaders in the automotive industry and beyond.
    "We are extremely pleased and honored with this 2001 Entrepreneurial Award. It is enormously gratifying to see how our business and technology vision receives worldwide industry acclaim. Also, these are great moments for our employees and investors and I would like to thank them for their hard work and trust.
    "Receiving this award from a highly reputed and respected research institute like Frost & Sullivan is not only a firm acknowledgment of our vision, it is a real milestone in the further development of our leadership position as a supplier of enabling technology for next generation telematics infrastructure and services," says Marc Maes, co-founder and co-CEO of ACUNIA.