NeuralTools^® to Offer Robust Predictions in Excel

OUT SOON, NEW TOOL PROVIDES USER-FRIENDLY NEURAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ithaca, NY - October 24, 2005. NeuralTools, Palisade Corporation’s new neural network add-in for Excel, has been subjected to intensive beta testing by a broad group of Palisade customers. Due out in November, NeuralTools has been put through its paces by more than 2,000 beta testers. In response, these users have given the new tool the highest praise known to the software industry: they’ve put it to work.

Although NeuralTools is not yet available as a commercial release, customers in enterprises as diverse as banking, healthcare, transportation, accounting, and the armed services are using the new tool to analyze real-world data in their day-to-day work.

NeuralTools offers two key advantages over existing neural network software: robust results and ease of use for the nonspecialist. NeuralTools can be used to address two basic types of problems––numeric prediction and classification of unknown entities. That makes it equally useful in anticipating workforce demands or medical diagnoses. NeuralTools will find applications ranging from underwriting to credit fraud detection to drug development. What sets NeuralTools apart from competing software are its accuracy in discerning patterns in data and its behind-the–scenes computational process––the user need not be involved in the details of the algorithms that drive the analysis.

Many beta testers have responded to the new software with praise. “So far I have been very happy with this new product,” wrote Michael Cochrane, research engineer for the U.S. Army. “It is certainly easy to use and data preparation for training and testing is straightforward because of the Excel environment. I particularly like the live prediction feature.”

In addition, healthcare industry consultant Barbara Tawny noted, “Most folks in the medical community are not engineers, but they can use NeuralTools to facilitate their own forecasts of future admissions, current occupancy, and discharges using existing patient billing data.” Ms. Tawny is the principal investigator in a four-year study of patient load throughout the entire metropolitan hospital system of Richmond, Virginia. Although she is a sophisticated analyst who often writes her own analytic software, she found great value in the beta’s ease of use. “To bring this kind of forecasting to non-engineer managers is just awesome!”

NeuralTools is now being offered for press preview. Editors and technical writers, to preview the most current version of NeuralTools, use the advance copy supplied with this release.