CEDROM-Sni Raises Financing for XML Software Subsidiary

CEDROM-Sni has
gained the support of financial partners to market all of its XML-based
software through its subsidiary IXIA.

The Fonds d’Investissement Desjardins of Montréal, Société Innovatech du
Grand Montréal and CEDROM-SNi have collectively invested $1.4 million in
spurring the growth of IXIA, a Montreal-based producer of software that
manages and indexes XML documents.

Marketing of IXIA software centers entirely on an e-commerce strategy. The
software, that enables companies to publish documents on their Intranets or
on the Internet, can be downloaded from the IXIA site.

The company anticipates that over 95 percent of its revenue will originate from
exports, mainly to the United States and Europe.

“This investment will let IXIA evolve within a high growth sector. The
acceptance of XML language as a standard is growing so fast that it will
equal the popularity of HTML language in the very near future,” said Eric
Bergeron, IXIA managing director.

Bergeron added that IXIA expects to capture a significant share of this new
market.

XML, or eXtensible Mark-up Language, is the latest document formatting
standard adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium, to which IXIA
belongs. The increasingly popular standard is instrumental to the standardization of
electronic information exchange on the Internet.

The XML software market is estimated at over $2.5 billion annually,
according to CAP Ventures, a U.S. consulting firm specializing in electronic
document management solutions.

Founded in 1998, IXIA is a subsidiary of CEDROM-SNi whose mission is to
develop and market software that manages and publishes XML on Intranets and
the Internet.