Azul Systems Pioneers Era of Unbound Compute; Industry Veterans Unite to Develop Network Attached Processing.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Azul Systems, Inc. has pioneered a new model for delivering unbound compute power without requiring customers to make any changes to their applications or existing environments. Optimized for today's new generation of business applications built on Java(TM) and J2EE(TM) platforms, Azul Systems solutions meet an important customer requirement: to eliminate the need for capacity planning at the individual application level.

Led by a seasoned executive team with a history of anticipating industry trends and designing technology solutions that drive new market directions, Azul Systems is the first company to enable massive amounts of compute power to be seamlessly plugged into an existing data center environment through a new approach called network attached processing. (see related announcement) This transparent approach to scaling enterprise applications uses large, shared pools of compute resources that can power hundreds of enterprise applications in a simple and cost effective manner.

"Azul Systems has designed a truly innovative approach to delivering the function of compute, one that will dramatically alter the dynamics in the systems arena and offer customers extraordinary value in managing their data centers," said Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager, enterprise computing at IDC.

"The fundamental shift in application development and virtualization of compute resources is here, and our vision of separating compute from the computer to gain magnitudes of efficiency will fundamentally change the economics of enterprise computing," said Stephen DeWitt, president and CEO of Azul Systems. "We designed Azul compute appliances to be transparently deployed in redundant compute pools into existing data center environments without forcing customers to make vendor-specific choices or take an architectural leap of faith."

It is not uncommon for large data centers to have hundreds of applications running on thousands of servers. Managing and maintaining these applications becomes more challenging and costly every year as more applications are brought on-line and legacy applications are migrated to new platforms. As a result, the need for reliable, predictable, flexible and scalable compute infrastructures to drive these new business applications has become a business imperative -- and thus the demand for network attached processing.

"Although J2EE has become the de facto standard for business application development, companies still face issues with reliability, predictability and compute power," said Bob Pasker Co-founder; Chief Architect -- WebLogic and Java luminary. "Azul has created a groundbreaking new class of compute infrastructure. Network attached compute seamlessly delivers on the dream of mainframe-class capabilities at new world economics."

Network attached processing delivers compute power as an enterprise resource that can be tapped by existing servers and operating environments running Java and J2EE platform based applications without requiring the expensive management overhead historically associated with scaling today's enterprise applications.

General availability of the industry's first network attached processing solution is expected in the first half of 2005 with end-user field trials beginning later this year. Azul Systems(TM) compute pools are comprised of ultra-high capacity compute appliances. Based on innovative multi-core silicon technology, each compute appliance contains up to 384 coherent processor cores and 256 gigabytes of memory in a fully symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) system.

Founded in April of 2002, Azul Systems is led by seasoned executives that have proven success in building companies from inception to highly successful publicly held companies. The world-class engineering and executive team includes some of the brightest minds in systems, software, and microprocessors. For complete biographies of the senior management team, please visit the Azul Systems website.

Azul Systems is well-funded by highly respected venture capital partners, including Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Com Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners.

About Azul Systems, Inc.

Azul Systems is introducing the industry's first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for Java and J2EE platform-based enterprise applications. Azul compute appliances eliminate capacity planning at the application level and much of the cost and complexity associated with the conventional delivery of computing resources. More information on Azul Systems can be found at www.azulsystems.com.

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