PITTSBURGH -- Haley Systems, Inc., a leading provider of business rules management systems (BRMS), today announced that the Haley Business Rules Management Suite has been selected by the Loan Servicing Division of Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., the principal subsidiary of Countrywide Financial Corporation, a provider of diversified financial services. Countrywide has begun work on its implementation of Haley's BRMS in support of the company's loan servicing systems.

Countrywide's choice of Haley followed a thorough technical evaluation and successful proof of concept. Among Countrywide's key criteria were: rules authoring decoupled from software development, so that business logic can be externalized from applications; a natural language interface that enables business decision makers to manage business logic themselves using plain English rather than programming code; platform-independent high performance; and a platform-independent rules language.

By leveraging rules technology from Haley, Countrywide's Loan Servicing Division will provide its business users with the high-performance rules solution they need to stay ahead in today's fast paced mortgage lending environment. The loose coupling between the rules implementations and its other software systems will deliver faster-time-to-market and increased quality by allowing Countrywide's Loan Servicing Division to develop, test, and deploy rules independently from other software. In addition, Haley's BRMS will support Countrywide's heterogeneous platforms (including, for example, MS Windows, IBM AIX and IBM AS/400).

"Providing our business users with an easy yet powerful way to define and maintain their business rules is a key factor for supporting business agility," said Peter Presland-Byrne, Executive Vice President, Application Development, at Countrywide. "Its natural language syntax allows us to decrease overall costs by better utilizing business analysts and users within the process of creating and maintaining rules. Haley successfully met our key technical criteria of platform independence and high performance which enables us to adopt the Haley product into our existing applications and new development. Haley is an advanced rules/inference engine with forward and backward chaining, advanced truth maintenance and integral support for higher normal forms. These all make it easier for us to deal with the complexities of servicing one of the largest and most diverse loan portfolios in the industry."

"Industry leaders like Countrywide are finding that business rule solutions provide a level of agility and flexibility that is not possible when business logic is embedded in custom application code," said Haley President and CEO Hans Witt. "A business rule services infrastructure provides a cost effective, scalable solution that will increase efficiency across Countrywide's operations. By choosing Haley, Countrywide business users will gain more control while reducing the burden on IT resources. They also will have the rule accessibility they need to respond rapidly to changing business conditions, without the time and expense of IT programmer intervention."

About Countrywide Home Loans, Inc.
Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., - a member of the Countrywide family: America's #1 home loan lender as ranked for 2005 by Inside Mortgage Finance (Jan. 27, 2006), Copyright 2006 - originates, purchases, securitizes, sells and services home loans and is the primary subsidiary of Countrywide Financial Corporation (NYSE: CFC). Countrywide Financial Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides mortgage banking and diversified financial services in domestic and international markets. Founded in 1969 and a member of the S&P 500 and Fortune 500, Countrywide Financial Corporation is headquartered in Calabasas, California and its family of companies has a workforce of more than 56,000 individuals and over 900 offices worldwide.

About Haley Systems
Founded in 1989, Haley Systems, Inc. is the first business rules management system (BRMS) vendor to address the demanding needs of dynamic enterprises that require frequent and rapid changes to complex business processes and rules. The Haley Business Rules Management Suite is the only BRMS on the market to combine high-performance, rules-based processing with natural English language understanding. Haley customers use plain English to automate business rules in their strategic software applications. By empowering business users to manage business rules and decisions directly from their desktop, Haley eliminates the IT bottleneck caused by dependency on programmer intervention to create and maintain rules. Haley users gain dramatically reduced rule change cycle times, resulting in several competitive advantages, including improved customer responsiveness, enhanced revenue opportunities, faster time-to-market and reduced IT costs. Major Global 1000 companies such as Adobe, Cigna, BUPA, KPN and One Beacon Insurance, as well as government organizations including the U.S. Army, and the Department of Labor rely on Haley products. Based in Pittsburgh, Pa., Haley is privately held, with venture capital backing from Pequot Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures, LP, and PA Early Stage. For more information on Haley Systems, visit www.haley.com.

HaleyAuthority and HaleyRules are trademarks of Haley Systems, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.