Pacific Life Transforms Compliance Training with SumTotal Systems

Life and annuities provider decreases compliance training expenses by 86% and cycle time by 85% while ensuring company-wide compliance with code of conduct and other regulations.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA (March 23, 2005) - SumTotal™ Systems (NASDAQ: SUMT), the largest provider of learning and business performance products, services and processes, today announced that insurance and financial services provider, Pacific Life Insurance Company, has transformed its company-wide learning and compliance initiatives with the SumTotal Enterprise Suite. Over the past year, the company has decreased compliance training expenses by 86% and cycle time by 85% via the Pacific Life eAcademy, which delivers online training and learning activities to more than 3500 corporate and field employees.

Pacific Life chose SumTotal to implement an enterprise-wide platform that could support e-learning and meet the challenge of deploying compliance training to employees across the country. Traditionally, the company had delivered mandated training in the classroom, making it difficult for field staff to participate and requiring employees to interrupt their day-to-day jobs for extended periods to attend training sessions. In addition to compliance, the company also wanted to significantly expand opportunities for employees to pursue skills, competencies and career development – something the classroom training model could not easily manage.

Pacific Life used SumTotal’s TotalLMS and TotalLCMS to build the eAcademy, the online training arm of the Pacific Life Academy, which serves employees of the company’s six divisions, both at corporate headquarters and in field offices throughout the U.S. The eAcademy’s online offering met with huge enthusiasm from employees who could now fit training in around their daily job responsibilities, and from management, who could quickly and easily determine employee training progress at a glance.

“SumTotal’s real-time, out-of-the-box reporting gives us a great view of enrollment, activity and training results -- something we couldn’t get from our old system,” said Justine Milberg, vice president, Pacific Life Academy and Greg Cleveland, Academy program director and project manager. “We’re still getting employees and management used to the fact that there are so many learning resources available to them now.”

The eAcademy now delivers, manages and tracks all instructor-led and online learning activities, including e-learning developed in-house and 400 SkillSoft courses ranging from business skills such as communication, customer service and project management, to IT skills including desktop applications and more advanced programming. SumTotal also offers the company’s line divisions the opportunity to develop and quickly deliver e-learning specific to their employees and individual products.

“SumTotal offered Pacific Life a solution custom-tailored to our unique needs and it paid for itself in terms of cost savings in the first year after we implemented,” said Milberg and Cleveland. “Right now, we’re just scratching the surface of what the solution can do. We want to develop more courseware in-house and look at blended learning programs. And we expect to continue realizing great ROI with the system. The results we achieved this past year are just a beginning.”

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 Pacific Life

Founded in 1868, Pacific Life provides life and health insurance products, individual annuities, mutual funds, group employee benefits, and offers to individuals, businesses, and pension plans a variety of investment products and services. Pacific Life currently counts more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies¹ as clients and is a member of IMSA (Insurance Marketplace Standards Association), whose membership promotes ethical market conduct for individual life insurance and annuities.

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, Aetna, 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."

1 Data compiled by Pacific Life using the 2004 FORTUNE 500 list, as of April 2004.