MICHAEL FORTE JOINS HOPS AS DIRECTOR OF SALES AND MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

Miami, Fla., January 31, 2006 - HOPS, a leading provider of data analytic tools and products, today announced that Michael Forte has joined the organization as Director of Sales and Marketing Technology.

In this new role, Forte will enhance the marketing and sales efforts through technology solutions that are critical to understanding and utillizing the company’s software products and services. This includes conception, production and integration of visual aids for tradeshows, sales engineering, client meetings and marketing solutions. Additionally, Forte will oversee all design and engineering around tradeshow representation for HOPS, a key component of their sales strategy.

"Michael has an amazing ability to address complex concepts with a straightforward and concise interpretation that makes it easy for anyone to understand," said Simeon Kohl, CEO of HOPS. "The combination of his client service abilities with his engineering and technical background will make Michael a critical contributor to our sales and marketing organization as we continue to scale up our product offerings and the amount of customers we serve."

Prior to HOPS, Forte was a Principal Systems Engineer for LinQuest Corporation. In this role, he was a liaison between the company and its clients, helping create and implement an end-to-end risk management process to integrate client projects. Forte also led a team as the Inter-Segment Test Lead to verify system requirements were being met for all Federal Government aerospace projects.

Previously, Forte was a Systems Engineer Lead at Boeing Satellite Systems. There, he was responsible for verifying compliance with customer requirements and investigating any system anomalies in order to solve client issues quickly. Forte also served as a liaison, briefing the customers at critical points in each project to ensure results.

Forte earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado and a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California.

###

About HOPS
HOPS (www.hops.com) is a leading provider of data analytic tools and products, utilizing its unique data analysis engine to quickly get clients to places they have never been before. HOPS, which stands for Heuristic Optimized Processing System, is the fastest and most flexible on-demand analysis solution available for large sets of data. In a recent test, HOPS did an all-column scan of over 70,000,000 rows in only 13 seconds. Deployed through a SaaS model, HOPS’ products can analyze data for an entire enterprise, offering the scalability to work with hundreds of terabytes of data, cost effectively. Currently, HOPS services over 100,000 unique subscribers, houses 600 terabytes of customer data and produces over 350,000 monthly reports for the healthcare, financial processing and retail markets. HOPS is headquartered in Miami Lakes, Florida.