Boole & Babbage COMMAND/POST to Oversee Ameritech's Entire IT Management Infrastructure.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 1996--Boole & Babbage, Inc. (NASDAQ: BOOL), the leader in end-to-end availability management, today announced that Ameritech, the Chicago-based telecommunications conglomerate and one of the world's 100 largest companies, has chosen COMMAND/POST to increase overall availability of every computing resource in its enterprise.

As one of the core components of Ameritech's Distributed Computing and Applications Management Services (DCAMS) architecture, COMMAND/POST will serve as a common console for viewing, correlating and automating responses to critical data generated by individually managed environments.

"The singular objective of DCAMS is to deliver superior service to our business unit customers," said Dave Bowman, area manager of midrange systems engineering at Ameritech.

"Our measure of success will be through proactive management of business applications and the critical networks and systems that support them. Our approach is to choose best-of-breed products that handle requisite IT management functions. Since COMMAND/POST is regarded as the best in its class for managing availability of the most diverse computing environments, it made sense to assign it as a central control point for gathering and correlating events associated with our mainframe, legacy and client/server applications and systems."

"Many of the world's largest service-focused organizations are faced with the daunting task of monitoring myriad applications spanning multiple technology trenches," said Jack Brown, senior marketing director for distributed systems management at Boole & Babbage. "COMMAND/POST has already proved to be a vital component at Ameritech and many other organizations worldwide for furnishing a centralized availability view of the health of their computing environments and applying automated corrective action."

Ameritech's enterprise management DCAMS model was spurred by the explosion of client/server applications within the company and its need to build a cost effective, sound management infrastructure that was highly automated. Targeting critical applications for automated management, such as carrier access billing and human resources, Ameritech began consolidating system servers.

The company assigned several systems management frameworks to cover key segments of its enterprise, including HP OpenView for managing SNMP networks and Tivoli TME 10 for managing UNIX and Windows NT servers. The missing piece was COMMAND/POST which was brought in to help operations personnel supervise all managed segments of the enterprise and provide end-to-end visibility and consolidation of alarms.

COMMAND/POST will also be used for automatic creation and population of trouble tickets.

"By tying together these different management tools to increase availability of our operating environments, we are confident that we can reduce by half the time it takes to identify and resolve problems anywhere in our enterprise," added Bowman.

COMMAND/POST, the flagship product in the Boole & Babbage Enterprise Automation solution set, presents an integrated, consolidated view of the entire IT topology, including all levels and types of hardware, the expanding middleware layer and business-critical end-user applications.

COMMAND/POST gives users a central command and control point for availability, fault management and automated operations throughout the enterprise environment. It automatically correlates, refines and synthesizes availability and fault data generated by virtually any computer, workstation, LAN, WAN and communications device.

A worldwide leader in making communications easy, Ameritech serves millions of customers in 50 states and 40 countries. Ameritech provides a full range of communications services, including local and long distance telephone, cellular, paging, security monitoring, cable TV, electronic commerce, on-line services and more.

One of the world's 100 largest companies, Ameritech (www.ameritech.com) has 66,000 employees, one million shareowners and $23 billion in assets.

Boole & Babbage is the worldwide leader in availability, performance and storage management solutions for distributed systems. Its Enterprise Automation solution set manages application availability from end-to-end, maximizing uptime and reducing operational costs for even the most complex IT enterprises.

Through advanced interoperability with leading frameworks and a flexible architecture easily scaled to customer requirements, Boole & Babbage products provide a comprehensive systems management and automation solution for all applications, systems and networks -- from the mainframe to the desktop. For more information, call 800/544-2152. -0-

Note to Editors: Boole & Babbage is a registered trademark of Boole & Babbage, Inc. COMMAND/Post is a trademark of Boole & Babbage, Inc. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Boole & Babbage, Inc.

Shelly Gordon, 408/526-3430

[e-mail]

http://www.boole.com