Software Patent Granted

Sopheon PLC
3 October 2001


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                            3 October 2001

                                       
                                 SOPHEON PLC


                SOPHEON GRANTED EUROPEAN PATENT ON TECHNOLOGY

                  FOR LANGUAGE -INTENSIVE BUSINESS PROCESSES


Sopheon, the international provider of information and knowledge solutions,
announced today that the European Patent Office has granted a patent covering
the software architecture and methodology at the core of proprietary
business-process applications offered by the company.

Barry Mence, Chairman, stated : 'This patent covers some of our most important
intellectual property which lies at the heart of existing and planned products
and services.  Its grant by the European Patent Office represents independent
validation of the technology as well as providing valuable protection for
Sopheon.'

The technology is already built into applications being used by teaching
hospitals in the Netherlands to pilot conversion of paper-based medical
protocols to electronic documentation.   A chemicals manufacturer is also
using the technology in a documentation system that is used to create
multilingual documents in one standard structure, with terminology monitored
across local language versions. Planning is underway for the integration of
the newly patented technology into Sopheon's web-based Accolade product
development system, applying it to the process of creating, publishing and
re-using content from the knowledge base that is built up by an organisation
during the product development life cycle.

The software architecture integrates the disciplines of organisational
science, language technology and data analysis in the application of
information technology to language-intensive processes.  It addresses the
challenge of creating and publishing documents that communicate with
controlled precision in a standardized way so that many people can work on a
process collaboratively. The technology is designed to enable people who are
not professional writers to create documents that communicate at a
professional level, with consistency in terminology and structure.

Work on the software architecture represented in the patent began in 1993.
Early development was supported by a grant from the European Union under the
BTIP international technology program.  Countries covered by the patent are
Austria, Belgium, Switzerland/Liechtenstein, Germany, Spain, France, Italy,
Lithuania, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.  A
U.S. patent is pending.


                                     Ends


For further information contact :

Barry Mence, Chairman  Sopheon plc                Tel : + 44 (0) 1483-883000
Arif Karimjee, CFO     Sopheon plc                Tel : + 44 (0) 1483-883000
Steve Liebmann         Buchanan Communications    Tel : + 44 (0) 20-7466-5000
Barbara Jansen         Citigate First Financial   Tel : + 31 (0) 205-754-080