Boole & Babbage Extends Systems Management Contract with North America's Largest Home Improvement Dealer; The Home Depot Chooses MainView To Continue Managing Traditional Mainframe and Parallel Sysplex Computing Environments.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 1, 1997--Boole & Babbage, Inc. (NASDAQ:BOOL), the leader in end-to-end availability management for the enterprise, today announced that it has signed a long-term contract renewal with The Home Depot, recognized by Fortune Magazine as America's "most admired retailer."

The agreement calls for Boole & Babbage to provide maintenance and enhancements for the MainView systems management product line, which manages The Home Depot's host-based computing environment, including traditional and Parallel Sysplex configurations.

"MainView's integrated management capabilities and consistent interface have been instrumental in helping us identify and manage potential failures in our systems across both CMOS-based parallel processors and our traditional mainframe environments," said Tom Larson, senior manager of technical services at The Home Depot.

"Beyond product functionality, Boole & Babbage has also been one of our most responsive vendors for technical support; we've never experienced delays."

With a growth rate of 22 percent a year and plans to reach 1,000 stores by the year 2000, The Home Depot has become more reliant on its IT operations staff to support the company's expansion, while also applying cost-control measures. For example, to improve performance and increase availability of its accounting and merchandising systems, without additional costs, the company migrated a significant portion of its workload processing to less expensive CMOS-based processors in a Parallel Sysplex.

However, to manage application workloads across the Parallel Sysplex, The Home Depot required the Single System Image (SSI) capability provided by the MainView integrated architecture. By utilizing MainView's highly flexible interface, technical analysts at The Home Depot can drill down to specific sysplex components and manage workload processing across multiple processors, all from a single point-of-control.

MainView also provides SSI views of multiple MVS images, making it well-suited to manage MVS and sysplex application and subsystem performance from the same console. This greatly simplifies the performance management process by identifying and resolving problems in either environment. It also eliminates the additional hardware and software costs of a separate sysplex console.

According to Mike Bunyard, senior marketing director, large systems at Boole & Babbage, "For an expanding enterprise like The Home Depot, it makes good fiscal sense to employ an all-inclusive management solution like MainView, that meets the needs of their entire mainframe operating environments."

The Home Depot also has plans to implement the InTune(TM) application performance analyzer from Boole & Babbage. Using an online hierarchical methodology, InTune provides technical analysts with a unique, internal view of application performance by stepping through the entire program and pinpointing delays, code efficiency problems and excessive CPU utilization. This significantly contributes to circumventing problems and optimizes application performance. Not only will InTune help The Home Depot reduce CPU resource usage but -- at the same time -- increase mainframe workload capacity.

MainView provides application- and workload-focused performance monitoring, helping system programmers deliver expected service levels. MainView's online monitoring provides point-and-shoot navigation, concurrent multisystem access, and Single System Image views of conformation from multiple systems.

The highly acclaimed MainView integrating architecture gives these products embedded capabilities that allow it to support and exploit parallel processing environments without modification. MainView products for MVS, MQSeries, CICS, IMS, DBCTL and DB2 are the only fully integrated systems management tools available that can concurrently support Parallel Sysplex and traditional mainframe environments.

Founded in 1978, The Home Depot is now widely regarded as the leading retailer in the home improvement industry, operating 484 full-service, warehouse-style stores in the United States and Canada. The stores sell approximately 40,000 to 50,000 different kinds of building materials, home improvement products and lawn and garden supplies to do-it-yourselfers, home improvement, construction and building maintenance professionals. Its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "HD" and it is included in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

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, visit us on the Web at www.boole.com or call 800/544-2152. -0-

Note to Editors: Boole & Babbage and MainView are registered trademarks of Boole & Babbage, Inc. InTune 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

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http://www.boole.com