Aetna Chooses SumTotal Systems to Enhance Performance-Driven Talent Management Intitiative for 28,000 Employees

Leading healthcare and insurance provider will use SumTotal Enterprise Suite to improve employee “scorecards” and drive greater business results

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (January 24, 2005) - SumTotal Systems (NASDAQ: SUMT), the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced that Aetna (NYSE: AET), one of the nation’s leading providers of health care, dental, pharmacy, group life, disability and long-term care benefits, has chosen the SumTotal Enterprise Suite to drive a sophisticated, performance-driven talent management strategy for more than 28,000 employees across the enterprise.

Over the past three years, Aetna has developed a successful talent and performance management program that ties individual employee “scorecards” back to the company’s business strategies. As the program has grown Aetna as been moving toward a more multi-functional initiative that integrates talent management with learning to help individuals improve their scorecards and drive greater business results for the company.

According to Deborah Kelly, head of learning services for Aetna, the company chose the SumTotal Suite to replace the company’s previous legacy system because SumTotal provided greater scalability and adaptability, and more readily integrated with Aetna’s other ERP applications. “As Aetna moved into a more sophisticated phase of its talent management strategy, it was important that we select a learning management system with more robust functionality that could integrate seamlessly with our internal and external infrastructure to drive a coherent, performance-driven talent management strategy,” she said.

Aetna’s goal in combining its talent management and learning initiatives is to integrate a number of processes into a single program that encompasses skills and competencies development, staffing, succession planning, internal and external job movement, project and staff assignments, promotions and “bench” -- or employee talent – assessments, among other human capital management processes, tying all of them back to the company’s business strategy.

“Aetna makes a substantial investment in building world-class, strategy-driven skills in its workforce,” said Kelly. “Our learning philosophy demands a return on that investment by linking learning directly to the skills and competencies required to drive Aetna’s success. We wanted a partner that shared that philosophy and could demonstrate that kind of return. SumTotal not only provides a full range of integrated learning, performance and talent management capabilities, but focuses as we do on making real, measurable business results its ultimate goal.”

Aetna plans to gauge the success of its enhanced talent management initiative in the short term by measuring increases in adoption rates and system usage among employees compared with usage of its previous legacy system. Longer term, the company plans to measure the program’s success based on its ability to retain top talent, to increase its “bench strength” (measured by internal movement of talent and decreased staffing costs), and its increased ability to link training data directly back to specific business results.

“Aetna’s vision for how technology plays an integral role in managing it’s most important asset – it’s people – is exciting for SumTotal because it directly maps to our vision for our products and our offerings,” said Andy Eckert, SumTotal CEO. “While I still see rudimentary definitions in the industry of Learning Management Systems being merely a system to track training, companies like Aetna are proving that sophisticated platforms like the SumTotal Enterprise Suite are managing an organization’s talent top to bottom through all phases of development. When combined with business results indicators, our technology is clearly a mission-critical application which is driving business strategy and business performance.”

About Aetna

As one of the nation’s leading providers of health care, dental, pharmacy, group life, disability and long-term care benefits, Aetna puts information and helpful resources to work for its approximately 13.6 million medical members, 11.6 million dental members, 8.3 million pharmacy members and 13.3 million group insurance members to help them make better informed decisions about their health care and protect their finances against health-related risks. Aetna provides easy access to cost-effective health care through a nationwide network of more than 646,000 health care professionals, including over 385,000 primary care and specialist doctors and 3,908 hospitals. For more information, please visit www.aetna.com. (Figures as of September 30, 2004)

About the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0

Providing unparalleled breadth in application and depth in business functionality, the SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0 is the industry’s most comprehensive, globally scalable learning and business performance offering, and the only one to combine learning management, learning content management, in-depth analytics and other mission-critical, standards-based learning applications on a single, integrated platform. SumTotal 7.0 promises more flexible, rapid, strategic delivery and management of learning activities; unprecedented options for measuring learning impact on revenues, expenses, cycle time and other business results; and unique interoperability and integration capabilities that dramatically reduce the cost of ownership.

About SumTotal Systems

SumTotal Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: SUMT) is the business performance and learning technology industry’s largest single provider of technologies, processes and services. Formed by the merger of industry pioneers Docent and Click2learn, the company is uniquely focused on helping organizations harness and manage mission-critical intellectual power to solve real-world business problems and produce significant bottom-line results. SumTotal has helped accelerate performance and profit for more than 600 of the world’s best-known companies and federal and local government agencies, including Microsoft, AT&T, US Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard, Vodafone, Lucent, Accenture, Cendant, Harley-Davidson, Wyeth, Wachovia and D & B. SumTotal Systems is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with offices throughout the US, as well as in London, Paris, Heidelberg, Sydney, Tokyo and Hyderabad, India.

Safe Harbor Statement/ Forward-Looking Statements
"Information in this press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements represent SumTotal Systems’ expectations or beliefs concerning future events and include statements, among others, regarding SumTotal Systems’ new product, SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0. These statements are not historical facts or guarantees of future performance or events and are based on current expectations, estimates, beliefs, assumptions, goals and objectives, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from the results expressed or implied by these statements. Readers of this press release are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Additional factors that could cause actual results to differ include, but are not limited to (i) unknown errors or bugs in SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0; (ii) unexpected shipment problems or delays of SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0; (iii) customers or partners delaying purchasing decisions; (iv) the acceptance of SumTotal Enterprise Suite 7.0 and future product offerings; (v) the ability to successfully implement SumTotal System’s solutions; (vi) the ability to successfully address technological developments and standards; (vii) ability to successfully manage growth, significant current and expected additional competition, and the need to continue to expand product distribution and services offerings; and (viii) other events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in SumTotal Systems' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the quarterly report filed on Form 10Q on November 15, 2004. SumTotal Systems assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release."