Boole & Babbage Forms Partnership with Compaq to Tightly Integrate Enterprise Management Solutions; Customers Gain End-to-End View of Windows NT-based Distributed Applications.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 1996--Advancing its position as a leading provider of end-to-end availability management solutions, Boole & Babbage (NASDAQ: BOOL) today announced a systems management partnership with Compaq Computer Corp. to further enhance the integration between the companies' products for advanced realtime event management and automation across distributed computing enterprises.

Through this partnership, Boole & Babbage and Compaq provide a solution to the enterprise event management problem created by the proliferation of client/server application workloads. This alliance is especially significant for the burgeoning Windows NT application market, where the market-leading product offerings from Boole & Babbage and Compaq combine to provide an advanced, end-to-end management and automation solution.

The new alliance is based on integration linking the extensible, automated event management capabilities of Boole & Babbage Enterprise Automation solutions with Compaq Insight Manager for managing availability of distributed applications across Compaq servers in mid-range and enterprisewide environments.

"With their mainframe-class power, high-end NT servers are becoming a critical application platform in our clients' distributed enterprises," said Saverio Merlo, senior vice president of marketing, Boole & Babbage. "Through this partnership, we provide mutual customers with a tightly integrated solution for managing Compaq servers as part of the overall mission-critical computing environment. Boole & Babbage adds important end-to-end management for distributed NT applications, ensuring their availability and instilling confidence in their deployment."

"Boole & Babbage excels at enterprisewide realtime event management, and Compaq excels at making its servers easy to manage," said Gene Austin, vice president, marketing, Compaq Systems Division. "Our partnership extends Compaq manageability directly to the comprehensive event management console of Boole & Babbage, giving mutual customers an even greater degree of application availability and control in managing business-critical applications on Compaq in their environments."

Boole & Babbage adds end-to-end availability management for applications distributed across Compaq servers. Boole & Babbage EnsignTM agents capture important NT application information plus hardware and operating system data from Compaq Insight Management Agents. The Ensign agents then provide a vital transport mechanism for Compaq server-related event messages to a central department-level console such as Ensign, an enterprise-level console such as Boole & Babbage COMMAND/PostTM, or an SNMP manager such as HP OpenView or IBM NetView for AIX.

COMMAND/Post and its distributed Ensign NT agent extend and enhance the capabilities of Compaq Insight Manager by adding software application surveillance, alarm detection and automated resolution to the hardware- and OS-specific statistics collected and reported by Compaq Insight Management Agents. Utilizing its Ensign agents, COMMAND/Post gives customers the distinct advantages of correlating alerts from Compaq Insight Management Agents and automatically initiating corrective actions and escalation, which was previously not possible.

"There is a real advantage to using the Ensign agent as a linking and transport mechanism for the hardware- and OS-level statistics gathered by Compaq Insight Manager," said Francois Banville, project manager, CGI, Inc., a mutual customer of Compaq and Boole & Babbage. "This capability means greater integration, consolidation and automation of event management for NT applications, which results in greater availability, efficiency and productivity."

Working cooperatively, Ensign and Compaq Insight Management Agents provide comprehensive alarm checks and analysis for NT applications in single- or multi-domain environments. Compaq Insight Management Agents are available for SCO UNIX, UnixWare, Novell NetWare, Microsoft Windows NT and OS/2; Ensign agents support these platforms plus more than a dozen additional UNIX versions.

Ensign agents are ready to use directly out of the box, performing more than 50 pre-defined alarm monitoring functions. Additionally, customers can easily create customized alarm checks with the basic Ensign command language. "The extensibility of the Ensign agents gives customers a single, flexible solution to support applications, including the `home-grown' variety, as well as systems," said Merlo of Boole & Babbage.

COMMAND/Post gives IT organizations centralized command and control for availability, fault management and automated operations of multivendor environments. Through its combination of message- and agent-based technology and tight interoperability with leading framework solutions, COMMAND/Post manages the entire IT topology from a central point.

Boole & Babbage is the worldwide leader in Enterprise Automation solutions for managing distributed systems. The company works in partnership with customers to boost systems availability, reduce overall computing costs and strategically automate the entire IT enterprise. Through advanced interoperability, Boole & Babbage solutions give customers proactive control of their distributed computing environments -- from mainframe to desktop. -0- Note to Editors: Boole & Babbage is a registered trademark of Boole & Babbage, Inc. COMMAND/Post and Ensign are trademarks 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

or

Compaq Computer Corp.

Jerele Neeld, 713/514-0484

[e-mail]

http://www.compaq.com