ASPs Focus for CrossKeys Quality of Service Management.

Business Editors

KANATA, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 10, 2000

CrossKeys Offers High-Growth ASP Market Unique Quality

of Service Management Vital to Bridging the Trust Barrier with

Their Customers

CrossKeys Systems Corporation (Nasdaq:CKEY) (TSE:CKY.) today announced that it will build upon its success in the incumbent and new entrant telecom market by addressing the challenges of one of the industry's fastest growing segments, the Application Service Provider (ASP) marketplace.

ASPs lease commercial software applications to business customers over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. In return, ASP customers expect guarantees of a high quality of service (QoS) before they will outsource mission-critical software.

"CrossKeys helps ASPs to overcome the trust barrier with their customers," says Ian McLaren, President and CEO, CrossKeys. "To attract enterprise customers, ASPs must be able to demonstrate the reliability of their service through application-specific SLAs. CrossKeys expertise in service assurance answers this need. We enable ASPs to identify network problems, roll-out new services and manage the end-to-end service commitments necessary to deliver applications right to the desk top."

The global ASP market will grow at exponential rates to $44 billion within four years, according to the research group, Ovum. Causing that revenue growth will be an increase in the total number of ASP users from 20,000 today, to more than 30 million in four years. This number of users reflects the corporate trend for companies to outsource everything that is not within their core competency.

"ASPs present a compelling business case to companies but widespread adoption will depend on demonstrating the reliability of the service," says Tim Weis, Consultant with the industry analyst firm, TeleChoice. "At the end of the day, ASPs are held accountable to the end-user. That responsibility means the ASP must exact and monitor service commitments from network and hosting infrastructure providers. All of this depends on service and network quality and savvy management."

CrossKeys will address this new market building from its Internet QoS software, CrossKeys Resolve(R). It includes the flexibility to address the key ASP concerns of managing the end-user experience with metrics such as application response time. With CrossKeys, ASPs will be able to take responsibility for the end-to-end service. This means having the ability to see problems that may arise at the source of the software application, in the telecom network transporting that application, and right to the desk-top of the end-user.

For more information, see CrossKeys whitepaper www.crosskeys.com/asp-wp.

CrossKeys became an associate member of both the ASP Forum and QoS Forum in January 2000. CrossKeys announced its newest release of CrossKeys Resolve software with greatly enhanced Internet QoS capabilities March 23, 2000.

About CrossKeys

CrossKeys Systems Corporation (www.crosskeys.com) develops software that makes the Internet work for business. The world's largest and fastest growing service providers manage the equipment, traffic and service on their telecom networks with CrossKeys.

CrossKeys Systems Corporation is a public company whose common shares are listed for trading on NASDAQ (CKEY) in the United States and on The Toronto Stock Exchange (CKY) in Canada.

CrossKeys and logo are registered trademarks and Resolve is a trademark of CrossKeys Systems Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders and are acknowledged by CrossKeys Systems Corporation.