BELLEVUE, WA, USA—October 24, 2000—Seagull Scientific, Inc. today announced that the SAP AG company of Walldorf, Germany has certified Seagull's BarTender label printing software as a "complete, technically verified turnkey software solution to joint customers, with reduced implementation times and costs." Seagull joins SAP as a software partner by providing "proven interoperability" with mySAP.com's open standards and by offering a "high-quality, release-stable interface." The mySAP Certified Software program promotes the openness of SAP's business solutions for large-scale corporate operations.

Until now, users of major label printing software packages needing to print labels using data from SAP had to go through a complicated sequence of data format conversions, including custom SAP programming. However, with BarTender, users can now directly print labels using data from the standard IDoc data format of SAP's R/3 software package.

Seagull says that a critical component of their next-generation enterprise strategy also centers on Commander, their new software integration utility included with the enterprise edition of BarTender. Commander is specifically designed to allow software programs to launch and control other programs, especially BarTender, without there necessarily being an explicit interface between those programs. Commander's primary use is to wait for the creation of certain user-specified files on a network and then "wake up" BarTender with instructions to print labels using a specific label design and data source.

"It is really the dual-capabilities of our direct IDoc support together with Commander that make BarTender so ideal for integration with SAP," says Jeremy Seigel, Seagull's CEO. "Commander lets BarTender print automatically in response to data generated by SAP, and our direct IDoc support lets BarTender process that data without any messy conversions. What's more, with BarTender able to run "in the background," its operation becomes completely transparent to the user. It's as if the labels were coming right out of SAP."