Kelly has over 20 years of experience in strategic management and solution sales in the software industry. His substantial knowledge of the North American market and familiarity with running a global team means that Kelly is ideally suited to managing Thunderhead's continued growth and its global sales operations. Specifically, he will be tasked with building Thunderhead's sales and partner channels.

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome Paul to Thunderhead. He brings an outstanding record in strategic leadership and a track record in achieving continued revenue growth to the company," commented Glen Manchester, Thunderhead CEO. "Paul's appointment will support our strategy to establish Thunderhead as the dominant player in the fast changing document generation and personalised communication market."

Prior to joining Thunderhead, Kelly was CEO of Quadstone Software, a private UK company which was acquired in 2005 by Portrait Software. His previous management roles include UK Managing Director of Sequent Computers, where he was responsible for 500 employees and an annual turnover of $300m, and European Regional Director of US-based Portal Software.

"Joining Thunderhead offers me an outstanding opportunity to leverage the company's recognised technical leadership and blue chip customer base, in order to create a truly scalable global sales infrastructure," said Paul Kelly.

Separately, Thunderhead, the leading provider of document generation technology, said that growing market demand for enterprise document generation systems has contributed to a substantial increase in company revenues.

Similarly, Thunderhead's ability to surpass customer expectations in areas such as speed of deployment, project costs, customer support and responsiveness has been validated in an independent survey.

Thunderhead has pioneered business user control of the customer communications process within an entirely open standards based architecture. The company's formula represents a new approach to document generation and has proven decisive in meeting customer expectations and in ensuring business success.

In the last year alone, Thunderhead's revenue grew by 120% from £1.89 million in 2004 to £4.16 million in 2005, with profits in excess of £1 million. Thunderhead has recently been selected by some of worlds leading Financial Services companies in the USA, UK and Australia, including Lehman Brothers, Prudential and ING Direct. Thunderhead's technology is applicable across all vertical markets and the entire financial services sector.

"As the pioneer of business user controlled, open standards based document generation solutions, 2006 looks set to be yet another successful year for Thunderhead. We are uniquely placed to take advantage of the escalation in worldwide demand for enterprise class document frameworks that streamline and manage the process of creating transactional communications," said Glen Manchester, CEO, Thunderhead. "During the last two years we have established Thunderhead as the global standard for the generation of OTC derivative trade confirmations. We will continue to build on our success and expertise in this sector and to expand in other vertical markets."

As a testament to Thunderhead's success, an Open Ratings Inc.'s Past Performance Evaluation report1 compiled in October 2005 using comments from Thunderhead customers, gave Thunderhead a rating of 91 out of 100, which is considered well above average. The report, which is designed to give an overview of company performance, shows that Thunderhead is highly regarded in the categories of reliability, cost, project delivery, product quality, customer support and responsiveness.

"Our commitment to developing products which consistently address customer needs means that we are poised to meet growing demand. Increasingly, enterprises are recognising the opportunity Thunderhead's Document Generation Framework offers them to enhance the customer experience, reduce costs, improve time to market and address compliance requirements. We are confident that this combination will provide further impetus for success and for our continued expansion globally," explained Manchester.