AppIQ Acquires Developer of Advanced SRM Solutions.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 17, 2003

XStormTech's Highly Scalable File Server Management Technology Extends AppIQ's Lead in Integrated SAN Management and Storage Resource Management

AppIQ(TM), the leading provider of enterprise software solutions that enable storage infrastructure to be managed as an application-focused utility, today announced the acquisition of XStormTech, a developer of advanced storage resource management (SRM) solutions. As a result of the transaction, which has now been completed, AppIQ owns all of the New Jersey-based company's intellectual property and software development operations.

XStormTech's technology overcomes the scalability issues inherent in first generation file-level SRM solutions by dramatically improving the speed by which file systems with millions of files can be discovered, scanned, and reported on. Once file-level demographics are collected, user consumption, file aging, file type, and file size alerts and reports are automatically generated, enabling administrators to quickly take action when users exceed disk space quotas, or when logical volumes run out of capacity. By combining these capabilities with AppIQ's industry-leading SAN management and storage operations management suite, customers will benefit from the first truly integrated solution that manages all of the logical and physical elements in an enterprise storage infrastructure.

"First-generation SRM solutions simply do not scale to meet the needs of large enterprises, and are not well-integrated with SAN management solutions," said Ash Ashutosh, CTO, AppIQ. "By integrating XStormTech's highly scalable SRM technology into our standards-based software platform, AppIQ will be first to market with a file server capacity and availability management solution that actually works in large storage infrastructures, and provides seamlessly integrated logical and physical storage resource management. This acquisition and integration effort is another proof point of our ability to innovate and deliver quality storage management software faster than the industry norm."

As a result of the acquisition, XStormTech founder Vijay Sarashetti has joined AppIQ to lead the project that is integrating XStormTech's SRM technology into the AppIQ management suite. Sarashetti is also serving as project manager and liaison between AppIQ's Massachusetts-based software development team and its off-shore development and support center located in Hyderabad, India.

"As a global engineer of applications and storage management at Deutsche Bank, I had the opportunity to review and analyze all available SRM solutions, but none met my scalability needs," said Sarashetti. "This led me to found XStormTech. While customers saw clear advantages in our technology, they wanted it to be tightly integrated with SAN management and storage operations management capabilities. Joining forces with AppIQ to deliver an industry leading integrated solution on a standards-built platform made perfect sense."

AppIQ will leverage its industry standard SMI-S data model and architecture to integrate the XStormTech technology into its management suite. The integrated solution will be available later this year.

About AppIQ

AppIQ, Inc. provides comprehensive software solutions that enable enterprise IT organizations to simplify the management of storage infrastructure and transform storage complexity into an application-focused storage utility. AppIQ's standards-based SAN management and storage resource management solutions are the first to seamlessly integrate physical and logical storage resource discovery, provisioning, reporting, automation, chargeback, asset management, and performance analysis with the management of business-critical applications such as Oracle and Microsoft Exchange. Customers that rely on AppIQ's solutions to reduce storage costs, improve IT efficiency, and increase business and application availability include Boston Stock Exchange, Nielsen Media Research, and The Weather Channel. AppIQ, based in Burlington, Mass., is a privately held firm funded by Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and other investors. For more information, visit www.appiq.com, e-mail [e-mail], or call [phone].

(C) 2003 AppIQ, Inc. AppIQ is a trademark of AppIQ, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.