American Greetings Chooses Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG to Manage Mission-Critical Business Applications.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 5, 1998--

Superior Integration, Design And Monitoring Capabilities Lead

Major Greeting Card Company To Choose CA's IT Management Solution

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that American Greetings, a leading supplier of greeting cards and related products in the "social expression" industry, has selected CA's Unicenter TNG to manage its extensive, multi-platform, enterprise computing infrastructure.

Unicenter TNG will be the management foundation for American Greetings' mission-critical business applications. Initial implementation of the solution is being undertaken as the company completes its Re-Engineering Danville Distribution (REDD) project, which focuses on redesigning the systems and network infrastructure of American Greetings' Danville, Ky. distribution center.

According to Peter Petrinovic, American Greetings' manager of technology architecture and infrastructure, REDD --the first distributed environment at American Greetings to be entrusted with business-critical applications-- underscores the need for an end-to-end enterprise management solution. The REDD infrastructure includes more than a dozen UNIX and Windows NT servers. These systems host vital applications that support an order fulfillment operation comprised of more than 500 staff processing millions of items per day.

REDD will be a template for management of other client/server deployments in the future, all requiring seamless, end-to-end management with Unicenter TNG. "The management of REDD's systems will be a roadmap for how other systems will be managed at American Greetings," said Petrinovic. "Once REDD is in production, we will clone its Unicenter TNG components to all other distributed systems in the company.

"We opted for Unicenter TNG primarily because of its superior level of integration, especially with American Greetings' existing product portfolio," said Petrinovic. "Other products were too specialized and lacked the range of monitoring capabilities that we needed."

American Greetings already had a long-standing familiarity with Computer Associates, having more than 60 CA products deployed in its mainframe and distributed computing environments. According to Petrinovic, Unicenter TNG's product design philosophy was an excellent match for the company's enterprise systems management needs.

Petrinovic is confident that Unicenter TNG will yield significant advantages for American Greetings, in addition to improved availability of critical systems. Two immediate benefits are the more efficient use of IT staff and the reduction of expenses for systems and applications management.

As American Greetings has deployed UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT Servers, it has discovered that additional labor is required for checking system status, troubleshooting problems, managing security and backups. Unicenter TNG provides the means for more proactive management of distributed systems and better overall use of the company's support staff. Unicenter TNG is enabling American Greetings to cut the support costs that are typically associated with newly deployed platforms.

"We wanted a solution that would allow us to integrate all of our existing monitoring and troubleshooting instruments," said Petrinovic. "We wanted IT management information to run back to a dashboard that could be used by someone who was not an engineer. Plus, we wanted to be able to automate our responses --to automatically determine the cause of the problem and then contact the appropriate service technician, or even to have the system automatically fix the problem."

The REDD project and Unicenter TNG deployment are scheduled for completion by the second half of 1998. However, American Greetings' plans for Unicenter TNG extend beyond traditional computing systems. A potential extension of the Unicenter TNG deployment is to manage and monitor the non-traditional systems in plant operations that directly handle material goods, such as sorting equipment.

"We are looking at developing intelligent Unicenter TNG agents to work with the programmable logic controllers that control this type of equipment," said Petrinovic. "We figure that the more we can automate, the more proactive we can become, and the lower our labor costs will be."

Unicenter TNG is an integrated enterprise management solution that enables organizations to manage all IT resources, encompassing heterogeneous networks, systems, applications, and databases. It provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for TCP/IP, SNA, IPX/SPX and DECnet networks, and 40 platforms including desktops, Windows NT, UNIX, AS/400, NetWare and mainframe environments.

Unicenter TNG is the only fully integrated management solution covering network discovery, topology, performance, events and status, security, software distribution, storage, workload, help desk, change management and other functions for traditional and distributed computing environments, as well as for the Internet and intranets. Unicenter TNG's intelligent manager/agent technology delivers highly scalable management of the entire computing environment, including hardware and software.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 11,000 people in 160 offices in 43 countries and had revenue of $4.5 billion in calendar year 1997. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing [e-mail], or calling 1-516-342-5224.

American Greetings Corporation (NYSE: AM) is the world's largest publicly held creator, manufacturer and distributor of greeting cards and social expression products. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings employs more than 21,000 associates around the world and has one of the largest creative studios in the world. More information about them can be obtained from its site on the World Wide Web -- http://www.americangreetings.com.

All product names referenced herein are the trademarks of their respective companies.

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