CUPERTINO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 04/25/06 -- Design Power, Inc., a supplier of design automation technology for complex engineered systems, announced that the largest user of its engineering/design automation technology, Robertson Ceco Corporation (RCC), was acquired by NCI Building Systems (NCI) of Houston, Texas (NYSE: NCS) for $370 million on April 7, 2006. During a conference call and webcast on February 22, following the announcement of the impending acquisition, NCI management praised RCC's fully automated engineering and detailing systems and its ability to significantly lower cost, eliminate errors and reduce cycle-time. These automated systems were originally architected by Design Power using the company's Design++ technology.

Much of the discussion in the webcast Q&A centered on RCC's advanced design automation and NCI's intention to utilize it across other NCI operations. In response to a question about RCC's engineering process, Norman Chambers, President and COO of NCI, said that design and engineering tasks that take NCI companies a week or more to do now, can be done by RCC in a matter of seconds or minutes, and that NCI envisions incorporating the cost benefits of this kind of error free design by the virtue of computerization throughout the organization in the future.

A transcript of the web-cast can be accessed at http://www.ncilp.com/nci/pdf/transcripts/2006_03acquisitionCall.pdf.

"We see this deal as a $370 million endorsement of our technology," said Ulf Strom, president of Design Power. "It is exciting to know that this acquisition will result in more than 15,000 buildings annually that will be engineered and detailed using the application. Design automation is absolutely crucial for the competitiveness of any manufacturing and engineering organization that custom-engineers systems and products to order. That is why we worked closely with RCC, to provide them with a design automation platform and a solution architecture that allowed their design engineers to capture the rules of the very complex metal-building design process. The system we developed with them can engineer and detail almost any metal building of any shape and size up to class ten in an almost completely automated computerized process."

About Design Power, Inc.

Design Power provides standard and custom design automation solutions to manufacturing and engineering companies using its Design++ platform. The unique ability of Design++ to handle very large component counts makes it suitable for automating the design of large systems, such as metal buildings. By separating engineering and design rules from the underlying rules engine and automatically tying the rules into a working system, Design++ significantly simplifies system development. This allows a company's product engineers (non-programmers) to capture, in record time, their in-house product and process knowledge for automated re-use.

Design Power's customers include Fluor Corporation; KBR-Halliburton; General Electric Company; Emerson Motor Company; Robertson Ceco Corporation; Selvaag Gruppen AS of Norway and many more. Design Power is also a part owner of Visual Network Design, Inc. (VND), which sells RackWise(TM), a Design++-based configuration and documentation tool for network designers and administrators.

Design Power was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Cupertino, California. Additional information can be found at Design Power's website: http://www.dp.com.

(TM) -- Design++ is a trademarks of Design Power, Inc. Any other product names used in this announcement are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Editorial Contacts:
Ulf Strom
Design Power, Inc.
408-366-6600
Email Contact

Wendy Lewis
FS Communications
650-691-1488
Email Contact

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