March 16, 2004

News Release: Insightful Wins Intelligence Contract from the Department of Defense; Researchers Enhance Technology for Unstructured Data Mining Supporting Counter-Terrorism Initiatives

Insightful Corporation (Nasdaq:IFUL), a leading provider of software solutions for analysis of numeric and text data, today announced that its InFact(R) text analysis business unit has been competitively selected by the US Army Research Institute to develop new technology for unstructured data mining under the project 'Leadership Agent for Multi-Source Information Fusion in Counter-Terrorism,'sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Intelligence analysts assigned to counter-terrorism activities need to track, link and extract abnormal relationship patterns from gigabytes of data originating from multiple heterogeneous sources. Relationship search is required and challenging because conventional search engine products do not understand the complexity of relationships in natural language text and human efforts are unable to correlate relationships across millions of documents quickly. InFact fills an important need in unstructured data mining, moving beyond products for keyword search and entity recognition and human capabilities to provide comprehensive relationship search.

'We are delighted that we have received this contract as a result of our researchers'in-depth knowledge of text analysis and the caliber of our research team,'said Giovanni Marchisio, director of research and development for emerging products, at Insightful. 'The Department of Defense has identified mission-critical software solutions in areas where Insightful has a leading edge, like Latent Semantic Analysis and relationship extraction. This contract supports our efforts to enhance InFact, a market-leading relationship search product, and make it available for both commercial and defense applications.'

ABOUT INSIGHTFUL

Insightful Corporation (Nasdaq:IFUL) provides enterprises with scalable data analysis solutions that drive better decisions faster by revealing patterns, trends and relationships. The company is a leading supplier of software and services for statistical data analysis, data mining and knowledge access enabling clients to gain intelligence from numeric and text data.

Insightful products include S-PLUS(R), Insightful Miner, S-PLUS(R) Server and InFact(R). Insightful consulting services provide specialized expertise and proven processes for the design, development and deployment of customized solutions. The company has been delivering industry-leading, high-ROI solutions for 17 years to thousands of companies in financial services, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, telecommunications, manufacturing, plus government and research institutions.

Headquartered in Seattle, Insightful has offices in New York City, North Carolina, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, with distributors around the world. For more information, visit www.insightful.com, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 1-800-569-0123.

Note to Investors -- Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements about capabilities of our software and services. Forward-looking statements are based on the judgment and opinions of management at the time the statements are made. Inaccurate assumptions and known and unknown risks and uncertainties can affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements for a number of reasons, including, without limitation, the risks associated with errors or defects in our software or services. More detailed information regarding these and other factors that could affect actual results is set forth in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2003. You should not unduly rely on these forward-looking statements which apply only as of the date of this release. We undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events, or circumstances after the date of this release or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated events.

Insightful, the Insightful logo, S-PLUS and InFact are registered trademarks of Insightful Corporation. ArrayAnalyzer, FinMetrics, NuOPT, SeqTrial, and 'human-like intelligence'are trademarks of Insightful Corporation. All product names mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE: Insightful Corporation

Insightful Corporation Judy McOstrich, 206-283-8802, ext. 356 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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