Acquisition

Billam PLC
9 November 2000

                                  Billam Plc

The directors of Billam Plc announce that they have agreed a phased investment
of £3 million in Autonomics Limited, a software business, the first product of
which is Transaccs, a financial modelling tool.

TransAccs, is aimed at the multi-million dollar worldwide market for financial
planning software in the financial and corporate sectors. The corporate market
is the planning/budgeting area of the Enterprise Resource Planning market with
the financial one being the market for analytical model-building in Banking
and Investment Management Houses. AMR Research Inc predicts that the worldwide
ERP market will reach $66.6billion in 2003 with the corporate Financial
Management element estimated by Giga Information Group to be $6billion in the
same year. The Finance House sector is harder to quantify as there are few
effective products in this area due to its demanding nature. Nevertheless,
there are grounds for thinking this market could also be substantial for the
right product.

The cost of using standard spreadsheet tools is huge: the process of building,
checking and amending such models is time-consuming and expensive, and the
error rate in 'finished' models is unacceptably high. Surveys by
PriceWaterhouseCoopers and KPMG conclude that 50% to 80% of financial
spreadsheet models contain serious errors so as to make them unfit for
purpose. The cost of building models is illustrated by commercial
model-building companies who can charge as much as £50k per model.

In contrast the productivity gain with TransAccs is considerable. TransAccs
models are built via an extremely ergonomic and easy to use point & click MS
Windows interface. They are automatically created to full double-entry
International Accounting Standards, are driven via a cell-grid like a
spreadsheet, but are under complete programme control. Consequently TransAccs
allows the production of much more sophisticated models than could be made by
hand. In addition they are more flexible, reliable and powerful than standard
spreadsheet models with errors in the model eliminated, yet still with the
benefit of 100% Microsoft Office compatibility.

TransAccs models can be built as single business units similar to those
created manually in Excel or as multi-currency, multi-unit consolidating
cascades. In the latter form not only the individual business units can be
flexed but also the whole pyramid, so that units can be moved about to
simulate re-structuring of the entire organisation. In this way TransAccs can
be used to model the business units of a large corporation including internal
re-structuring and equally (since units can be moved between different
parents) the companies in an industrial sector, including Merger & Acquisition
activity.

Potential customers consist of analysts, corporate financiers and M & A
specialists in institutions such as Investment Banks, Brokers and Fund
Managers, as well as executives in multi-national corporations world-wide.
TransAccs can be delivered in a variety of different forms depending on the
target user and it contains a flexible licence system so that it can achieve
this. In particular, it can be used as a stand-alone model-builder with full
structuring capability, as an add-on to a corporate accounting system, or as a
disseminated budget consolidator where cut-down versions could be distributed
throughout an organisation. In addition there are other versions, at present
company confidential, where it can be supplied as part of a service to broking
houses with significant cost saving.

TransAccs has been designed and built by a small team headed by John Russell
Taylor who has a software and financial background. Mr Taylor is a Cambridge
mathematician and Sloan Fellow of the London Business School. He co-founded
the forerunner of the well known First Call agency, developer of the BOCS
on-line ticketing system. BOCS was successfully sold around the world
including the South Bank complex, Barbican Centre, and many theatres on
Broadway, New York. He has also been a partner/director of two venture capital
companies including MTI, arguably the most successful of the smaller VC funds
in the UK with a particular focus on hands-on investment in early-stage
technology ventures.

As a member of a VC team he has been involved with investments in numerous
technology companies ranging from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scanners to CDrom
manufacture, from sea-weed impregnated bandages through fish vaccines to
accounting software. MTI was the startup investor in Linx ink-jet printers
which floated on the London main market, as well as Sky Software which was
sold to Sage Plc and became the back-bone of Sage's dramatic rise to world
dominance in its field.

As Executive Chairman he has backed two successful software startups which now
have quoted status (Intelligent Environments Plc and Flomerics Plc). IE
progressed from Expert System Shells, through 4th Generation Application
Development Software to its present status as an AIM-listed Internet
Consultancy. Flomerics grew out of work carried out at Imperial College on
Computational Fluid Dynamics and has produced the leading software in the
world for modelling fluid flow in gas and liquid. For example, it is employed
by most major chip and computer system manufacturers to extend the life-time
of circuit boards by helping designers to optimise heat dissipation in system
cabinets.


Further details of this investment will appear on Billam's website on:

www. billamplc.co.uk


or contact Peter Hoskins on 020 7702 5544