Bluesocket Reaches 1,000 Customer Milestone; New Centralized Management for Enterprise WLANs Now Available.

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Bluesocket, Inc. (www.bluesocket.com), the leader in open wireless security and management solutions, announced today that it has reached the 1,000 customer milestone during the first quarter of this year. Leveraging its expertise in wireless, security and management solutions, Bluesocket has become the preferred end-to-end provider of WLANs that are deployed worldwide in global organizations including education, government, healthcare, hospitality, enterprises and public access. Bluesocket has also shown early mover advantage in emerging verticals such as libraries and airports. The company continued to execute on its WLAN strategy by increasing its customer base by over one third during the past fiscal year.

The Bluesocket WLAN customer portfolio consists of a broad array of customers such as Parker Hannifin (US and UK), ATOS KPMG Consulting, United States Joint Forces Command's Joint Futures Laboratory, National Library of Australia, Melbourne Markets, Sydney Cricket Ground Trust, AIS, Insead (France) and London School of Economics.

"Bluesocket has the customers and the products, it has figured out where the industry is going, and it is expected to have the cash and the heft to make all changes necessary to stay competitive," said Max Smetannikov, a senior analyst with The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. This comment appeared in an independent report, titled "Bluesocket Stumps for Funding with WLAN Security and Management Pitch," which was published on January 10th of this year (see Editor's Note below).

BlueView Management System

In addition to Bluesocket achieving a major customer milestone, the company announced that its BlueView Management System is now available. Centralized management for the enterprise WLAN, BlueView is designed for organizations with larger, multi-site WLAN deployments using multiple Bluesocket Wireless Gateways as well as service providers who demand mature operations capabilities and remote management. It contains configuration, policy-enforcement and monitoring capabilities to facilitate rapid provisioning and management of local and remote multi-site WLAN deployments. Network administrators can use BlueView to auto-discover and manage all Bluesocket Wireless Gateways and provide real-time performance monitoring, diagnostics, detailed network information, and event/alarm notification. IT management can lower operational costs by automating provisioning and maintenance tasks such as configuration backups, patch applications, software upgrades and WLAN policy changes.

"With students, faculty and guests logging onto our network from remote sites, retrieving and downloading information, we needed a solution that would manage the security and policies of our many wireless gateways," said Todd Acheson, Internet Systems Manager, Communication Network Services, Ohio University. "BlueView lets us automatically monitor the status of our devices, as well as the information being transferred, from one central location, freeing up valuable time and resources, not to mention protecting our network."

"As the wireless market matured, we expanded on our vision to bring trust and simplicity to the expanding trust boundary by leveraging feedback from our growing customer base," said Ralph Calistri, CEO of Bluesocket. "The strength of our engineering and marketing teams enabled us to deliver on that strategy, having a direct impact on our customer success. Bluesocket will remain committed to delivering our industry-leading WLAN solutions based on open-standards, offering our customers choice when making purchasing decisions."

Pricing and Availability

The BlueView Management System is currently available worldwide through authorized Bluesocket resellers. Pricing begins at $9,995 USD. For other regions please contact your regional sales manager.

Bluesocket Solutions Overview

The BlueView Management System uses an industry leading Web services (XML-RPC) communications architecture that has been incorporated into all of Bluesocket's Gateways since their inception in 2001, and on which the Secure Mobility(R) architecture is based. Bluesocket Wireless LAN solutions help secure and control Wi-Fi networks and provide universal authentication, Secure Mobility(R), policy and bandwidth management through unparalleled interoperability with legacy infrastructure and WLAN standards. Bluesocket has implemented real-time monitoring of Wi-Fi users' data to detect malicious traffic based on the users' actual behavior without requiring any client-side software. This enables administrators to automatically block network access to hackers or worm infected users well before traditional signature-based tools have updates available.

About Bluesocket

Founded in 1999, Bluesocket is the leader in open wireless security and management solutions that simplify the complexities of mobile enterprises. Thousands of Bluesocket Wireless Gateways are deployed by leading enterprises including Harvard University, Honeywell, Universal Health Services, Toyota, Parker Hannifin and others who require policy-based, open-systems solutions to secure, manage, and profit from their wireless networks. (www.bluesocket.com)

Secure Mobility, BlueSecure and BlueView are trademarks or registered trademarks of Bluesocket, Inc. All other trademarks, trade names and company names referenced herein are used for identification only and are the property of their respective companies.

Editor's Note: The 451 Group's report, "Bluesocket Stumps for Funding with WLAN Security and Management Pitch," referenced above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored by nor otherwise funded directly by Bluesocket. The report and its entire contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2005, and are reproduced here by permission. The entire contents of this report are available at www.the451group.com.