Appistry Announces Two New Customers for Its Right from the Start Program; DreamType Selects Appistry EAF to Power Innovative One-to-One Marketing Platform; Clearent to Launch Revolutionary Appistry EAF-Based Payment Processing Service.

WASHINGTON -- Appistry, the pioneer and leading provider of application fabric software, today announced that startup firms Clearent and DreamType have selected Appistry EAF within which to build their service offerings, taking advantage of Appistry's new "Right From the Start" program, announced separately today. Appistry EAF will provide the new customers with a scalable, robust environment within which they are able to develop, deploy and manage their respective services.

"Startups today need every competitive advantage they can get," said Appistry president and chief executive officer Kevin Haar. "Appistry EAF allows our startup customers to take full advantage of some of the most powerful trends in computing today: commoditization, virtualization and grid computing. As a result, Appistry is well positioned to help startups who aim to be the next Google, Amazon or MySpace of their field."

Fabric-Based Payment Processing Engine Clears the Way for Clearent

Clearent is a visionary startup working to change the rules of the credit card payment processing game. The company is coupling a robust transaction processing engine with a next-generation "Web 2.0" user interface to create a service that drives competitive advantage through new end-user features, responsiveness, and an exceptional customer experience.

Conventional approaches to system development in the payment processing industry depend largely on legacy mainframe technology or, at best, fault-tolerant servers. However, this approach is anything but agile, and creates a steep perceptual barrier for new entrants to the market. Not only are up-front costs high, but unwieldy management regimes and steep growth costs come along for the ride as well.

In order to effectively compete, Clearent knew it needed to look beyond "big iron." To be successful, it would need a technology approach as agile as its business.

"A common perception in our industry is that you need to start with a certain scale to be effective," said Dan Geraty, president and chief executive officer of Clearent. "Our belief is that with the Appistry fabric in place, we are able to shatter these barriers and achieve competitive performance and economics with much smaller volumes."

Clearent chose to build its core payment processing engine on Appistry EAF because the product transparently provides the agile environment the company's application requires. How did Clearent define agility? It needed:

--high reliability: Clearent's processing application would need to process each customer payment "on-time, every-time"

--ready scalability: Clearent was counting on the ability to build a moderately sized infrastructure at first--that it would later be able to effortlessly scale as it grew, without forklift upgrades

--operational efficiency: As it would one day be counting on a large number of servers to power its operation, Clearent needed an environment that was fully virtualized and easily managed

--quick time-to-market: Clearent sought business advantage by empowering its developers to utilize modern tools such as the Microsoft .NET Framework. By doing so, it would be able to field its initial service more quickly, and respond more rapidly to incremental requirements

In the end, Clearent selected Appistry EAF because it would provide them the performance, manageability and economics they required to affect a shift in the payments industry.

DreamType's Scalability Dreams Answered

For Brian Gullette, president of DreamType, Appistry EAF and the resources offered through Appistry's "Right From the Start" program provided exactly what his small technology company needed.

"Until finding Appistry we thought we'd need to wait to tackle the scalability problem," said Gullette. "I assumed it would require IT consulting, expensive hardware and software, setting up and hosting load-balanced servers, stress-testing, etc. But the Appistry solution was a way for us to leapfrog all this."

DreamType provides a services for marketers that allows them to produce highly effective 1-to-1 marketing campaigns for email, print and the Web. At the core of the service is an innovative, Web-based application that provides dynamically generated, highly customizable images for the company's customers.

In order to keep up with the demands its growing customer base placed on its CPU-intensive application, DreamType needed to be able to easily scale the application across a potentially large number of servers. To ensure the highest levels of customer satisfaction, the company also wanted to increase the application's reliability. Furthermore, they needed to do these things as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible.

DreamType chose to deploy Appistry EAF because it transparently provides each of these attributes. Deployment of the Appistry EAF-based solution, which now powers the company's offering at http://dreamtype.com, took less than one week. The enhanced application immediately provided DreamType with a level of scalability and reliability unattainable by their original application.

"We were amazed to see how quickly the Appistry product was able to impact our application, and how little effort it took," said Gullette. "Using Appistry EAF, we estimate that we've avoided nearly two man-years in development and deployment costs to get to the same place. On top of that, we expect to reduce operating costs to half of what they'd be had we tried to scale our apps out using the usual techniques."

Beyond raw performance, DreamType now benefits from the flexibility inherent in Appistry's application fabric-based approach. The company is able to easily increase the capacity of its service using inexpensive, commodity-grade computers without increasing it costs for managing the application.

Right From the Start

Appistry's "Right From the Start" program includes software and services designed to help companies scale more quickly than ever before possible on relatively modest budgets. Program elements include:

--"Right From the Start" licensing, which provides no-cost, production-use licenses for Appistry EAF, enabling startup organizations to get started quickly, and with no risk

--Dedicated support contacts and expert-level architecture assistance ensuring quick and successful deployment

--Exclusive access to a variety of resources via targeted, Web-based portal

--Ongoing marketing collaboration and support, assisting program members with publicizing the advantages their solutions offer over those of traditionally architected competitors

Additional program elements, benefits and details can be viewed online at http://www.appistry.com/rightfromthestart.

About Appistry

Appistry is the pioneer and leading provider of application fabric software, which IT and engineering organizations use to quickly and easily deploy large-scale, time-critical applications that are simultaneously deployable, scalable, manageable and dependable. Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (Appistry EAF) is Appistry's flagship product. Appistry EAF offers the scalability of grid computing, the broad applicability of application servers and the manageability of virtualization in one complete solution that runs on affordable commodity-grade servers. In doing so, Appistry EAF enables customers to easily deploy and operate applications for "real-time" analytics, high-performance computing (HPC) and high-volume data processing, as well as agile web, SOA and enterprise applications.

For more information, visit Appistry online at http://www.appistry.com.