Banyan's Year 2000 Service Offerings Prepare Bowdoin College to Make the Grade in the Next Millenium.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 1, 1998--

Bowdoin College Most Recent Banyan Customer to Gain Year-2000 Readiness Quickly and Easily

Banyan Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:BNYN), a leading provider of networking product and services solutions, today announced that it has assisted Bowdoin College with a successful transition in making its Banyan networking software Year 2000-compliant. A team of Year 2000 consultants from Banyan's professional services organization assessed, planned, renovated, and then tested the college's existing network and peripherals over a six week period, making Bowdoin College's network and related application software Year 2000 ready well in advance of the turn of the century.

This means that Bowdoin College can now grant its 1,500 students, hundreds of guest accounts and all faculty members access to all electronic files, from grade transcripts to course curriculums, even after Dec. 31,1999. The college, established in 1794, is located in Brunswick, Maine and was recently ranked one of the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by US News and World Report.

"As an extension of the many years of excellent customer support we have received from Banyan, we now have one experienced and reliable place to go for assistance in our Year 2000 efforts," said Rebecca Sandlin, Systems Integrator at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. "Over several weeks, the Banyan team worked closely with our IT group to help assess the problem, plan the changes, then renovate and test our large, diverse network to handle the Year 2000 date." She added, "The Banyan team was knowledgeable, hands-on, completely thorough, and even took extra steps to work with 3rd party vendors to upgrade software and hardware to Year 2000-compliant revisions."

Banyan announced its suite of Year 2000 offerings earlier this year, as part of an expanded commitment to providing a full range of services to enterprise network customers. Banyan's 2000 Service Offerings include FastStart, a rapid immersion in Year 2000 requirements for network administration and messaging; Assessment, a comprehensive inventory and analysis of an organization's computing environment; Planning, a service that identifies the steps and staging necessary for bringing the network into compliance; Renovation, where data and applications are migrated to the compliant versions; and Network Validation, for comprehensive testing.

"Banyan's extensive experience in network operating systems, messaging, directory services and Internet technology has provided Bowdoin College and other customers such as World Bank, The United Nations and Arbella Mutual Insurance, a wide range of flexible, multi-vendor networking solutions," said Bob Burke, Banyan's senior vice president of worldwide sales and service. "Banyan and its partners combine to form a single source for professional resources to plan, implement and manage a customer's unique network solutions."

Bowdoin chose the Banyan network as their primary networking infrastructure in 1994, and still today finds it to be the most stable, cost-effective, and reliable system available. The college's successful relationship with Banyan will continue to evolve as Bowdoin integrates Microsoft Windows NT(R) into their existing Banyan environment. The integration tool of choice for the college will be Banyan's own StreetTalk(R) for Windows(R) NT(R) product, the proven enterprise directory service for the Windows NT platform. Because of the benefits already realized by adopting Banyan's Year 2000 product and service offerings, Bowdoin plans to utilize Banyan's Transition Services in the expansion of their networking environment. Banyan's Transition Services consist of co-existence, planning, design and implementation for

organizations adding additional capabilities, as well as services for those transitioning to new networking technologies.

"The college is taking every possible step to ensure that Year 2000 issues will have minimal effect on faculty, staff, and students," said Tad Macy, Bowdoin's Assistant Director of Computing Information Services. "With less than 500 days to the new millenium, Banyan's comprehensive set of Year 2000-compliant products and services, experienced, professional staff, and expedient processes allowed us to confidently and quickly ensure that our NOS is Year 2000-compliant. Banyan provided advantageous and logical choices for us in handling the college's Year 2000 issues."

About Banyan Systems Incorporated

Banyan Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:BNYN), founded in 1983, is a leading provider of advanced enterprise solutions that integrate multi-vendor networking environments. Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., USA, Banyan (http://www.banyan.com) supports hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies worldwide with products and services that integrate core business applications and intranets creating highly reliable, easily managed, and secure global networks. The company also provides co-existence and migration services, secure and remote access for business applications and tools to deploy and manage intranets, directories and messaging. Its majority-owned Internet subsidiary, Switchboard Inc. (http://www.switchboard.com) is the #1 on-line white and yellow pages directory. Banyan, VINES, StreetTalk and BeyondMail are registered trademarks of Banyan Systems Incorporated. StreetTalk is a product of Banyan Systems Incorporated and not a product of McCarthy, Crisanti & Maffei, Inc.

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