Scholarships Awarded to Winners of Fourth Annual DemandTec Retail Challenge

SAN CARLOS, Calif., Nov. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — DemandTec, Inc. (Nasdaq: DMAN), a leading provider of on-demand optimization solutions for retailers and consumer products manufacturers, today announced the winners of the fourth annual DemandTec Retail Challenge. Each student winner was awarded a scholarship for the 2010-11 school year to the college or university of his or her choice and has been invited to participate in a grand finals and closing bell ceremonies at the NASDAQ OMX Stock Market on January 11, 2010 in New York City. One hundred and sixty eight students from eighty four teams participated in this year’s challenge, with a nearly equal number of male and female students participating.

“This year’s student participants responded to our most challenging contest to date with creativity, passion, and discipline. The DemandTec Retail Challenge continues to grow nationally in terms of number of both participants and sponsors. This tells us that, perceptions to the contrary, there is a thirst for and appreciation of math and science in our high schools,” said Dan Fishback, President and Chief Executive Officer of DemandTec.

The judges named the winning teams of Elise Sugarman and Jody Zhang of Mountain View High School (Calif.), Elise Strobach and Whitney Zegarski of Osceola High School (Wisc.), Luke Bonde and Derek Grunnes of Patrick Henry High School (Minn.), Sheri Fitzsimmons and Jennifer Gorman of Champlin Park High School (Minn.), Alyson Queen and Shannon Theobald of Travelers Rest High School (S.Carolina), and David Soltis and Robert Mancine from Seton-La Salle High School (Penn.).

The DemandTec Retail Challenge is a community outreach scholarship competition for high school seniors designed to promote the practical applications of math in a business environment. The web-based contest presents students with a business case study and challenges them to solve a common retail analytics problem while contemplating a variety of category management principles such as assortment, pricing, and inventory management.

The 2009 challenge, which ran from October 19 to November 20, presented a software-based business simulation with each day representing a week in a retail business environment. Participants were provided with twenty weeks of past retail sales data to analyze in order to make pricing and inventory decisions for the subsequent twelve weeks. The goal was to make as much profit as possible by the end of the challenge. The two-person teams that achieved the highest quantitative results advanced to the finals for their region, and the finalists presented their results and strategies to a panel of judges who determined the winners based on a combination of both quantitative and qualitative factors.

“We designed the DemandTec Retail Challenge to encourage high-school students to exercise both their left-brain and right-brain capabilities. They use their analytic abilities to interpret the retail data and their creativity to decide how to act on that data and present what they believe to be optimal solutions to the judges,” explained Suzanne Valentine, Vice President of Science & Analytics at DemandTec and executive sponsor of the contest.

DemandTec employees participated as mentors to support and assist the students as they worked on the challenge. Judging was based on each team’s understanding of the problem, their solution (including forecast accuracy), their ability to articulate how they achieved their results and the collaboration and teamwork they demonstrated in presenting their findings.

The 2009 challenge was co-sponsored by retailers Safeway, Target, Giant Eagle and BI-LO as part of a community outreach program designed to foster awareness of the practical applications of math in a business environment.

The DemandTec Retail Challenge is a flagship component of DemandTec’s Corporate Citizenship program, which strives to integrate social responsibility into all business practices and engages a cross-functional and geographically diverse set of employees to identify specific initiatives where DemandTec employees can play a unique role, particularly in the areas of education and youth development. More than $75,000 in scholarship money has been awarded since the inception of the DemandTec Retail Challenge in 2005.

About DemandTec

DemandTec (Nasdaq: DMAN) enables retailers and consumer products companies to optimize merchandising and marketing decisions, individually or collaboratively, to achieve their sales volume, revenue and profitability objectives. DemandTec software services utilize DemandTec’s science-based software platform to model and understand consumer behavior. DemandTec customers include more than 195 leading retailers and consumer products manufacturers such as Ahold USA, Best Buy, ConAgra Foods, Delhaize America, General Mills, H-E-B Grocery Co., Hormel Foods, Monoprix, PETCO, Safeway, Sara Lee, The Home Depot, Walmart and WH Smith. Connected via the DemandTec TradePoint Network(TM), DemandTec customers have collaborated online with over 2.5 million trade deals. For more information, please visit www.demandtec.com.

Media Contact:
Mitch Kristofferson, DemandTec, Inc.
(650) 226-4630
mitch.kristofferson@demandtec.com

Investor Contact:
Tim Shanahan, DemandTec, Inc.
(650) 226-4603
tim.shanahan@demandtec.com

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SOURCE DemandTec