HALO Technology Holdings

www.haloholdings.com HALO Technology Holdings, Inc. is a global provider of a diversified range of standards-based enterprise software applications and on-demand solutions. HALO’s strategy is to acquire and operate both private and public enterprise software companies for sustainable and profitable growth. HALO provides its portfolio companies the resources and flexibility to focus primarily on customer service and product quality. At the same time, HALO seeks to add companies with an established customer base and technologies that can be leveraged across the organization. Everyday, leading corporations across a wide array of industries, including Fortune 1000 corporations, rely on HALO’s portfolio companies to deliver high quality, enterprise class software and services on a global basis.

The company announced plans to merge its Tesseract and ECI subsidiaries
into Empagio, HALO's premier human resources solutions provider. The closing
of the ECI acquisition is scheduled for February 28, 2006. The combination of
the subsidiaries will create a leader in the Human Resources Management
Solutions (HRMS) industry, boasting an impressive roster of Fortune 1000
enterprise customers and more than two million lives under management. The
merged company will be called Empagio and will be headquartered in Atlanta,
Georgia.

The planned merger ushers in the second phase of HALO's overall strategy,
which is to combine strong on-premises software solutions that serve an
established customer base with a modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.
By offering on-premises and SaaS solutions under the same brand, Empagio is
uniquely positioned to deliver long term support to existing customers while
simultaneously providing a migration path to a best-of-breed SaaS solution.
Specifically, Empagio is initiating HALO's "lift and shift" strategy,
providing on-premises customers with a clear path to the SaaS model, which
will result in lower cost, higher quality, and flexible HR solutions for
companies of all sizes. The addition of ECI provides a true Human Resources
Outsourcing (HRO) solution to existing customers.

"The merger of Tesseract, a well respected, world class HRMS provider, and
Empagio, a business service centric hosted solution, provides customers with a
seamless alternative to the complex and expensive offerings of some larger
vendors," said Charles W. Stevenson, HALO's chief technology officer. "It
further reinforces the second stage of our strategy of acquiring proven and
reliable mission-critical business solutions used by Fortune 1000
organizations and combining them to create a synergistic offering. As our
critical first step into the software-as-a-service market, we're using Web
Services and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to combine world-class
solutions and provision them as SaaS, making them available not only to the
enterprise, but also to mid-tier markets that previously could not afford
solutions of this caliber."

"A lot of people have the idea of developing SaaS-type companies in a
variety of enterprise software categories," said Ron Bienvenu, HALO's CEO.
"The barrier to entry here is not the ability to write hosted software, but
rather, getting people to trust you with mission critical applications. Our
unique lift-and-shift strategy underscores our belief that long term customer
relationships based on trust are more valuable than the ability to develop
cool software. We see ourselves as partners with our customers and look to
help them manage the transition to more modern technology platforms at a time
and pace that is appropriate for their business model, not ours."

"The Tesseract software is an amazingly robust, reliable payroll engine,"
said Randy Cooper, CEO of Empagio. "From customers as large as Home Depot
down to customers with less than a thousand employees, the Tesseract software
continues to deliver accurate and timely payroll processing for many on-
premises enterprise customers. With Empagio's SaaS delivery model, web-centric
architecture, and HRO delivery capabilities, these same customers can now
select from a variety of delivery models to find the one that best meets their
corporate objectives and, through a single trusted vendor, can implement their
desired transition strategy in a measured and timely manner."