City of Oceanside Uses VERITAS Software to Help Maintain Compliance with Public Records Requests Law.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- City Officials More Easily Manage Requests for Information During Busy Election Season; Information Search and Retrieval Time of E-Mail Records Significantly Reduced

VERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq:VRTS) today announced that the City of Oceanside, Calif. is using VERITAS Enterprise Vault(TM) content archiving software to help ensure all public records requests are met quickly and completely. Developed by KVS, a business unit of VERITAS, Enterprise Vault helps Oceanside's IT department fulfill public records requests in minutes instead of days, which translates into significant cost savings, particularly as the city copes with increased requests that come during an election season.

Oceanside, the third-largest city in San Diego County with a population of 165,000, receives between 9,000-12,000 e-mails each day. The California Public Records Request Act grants the public the ability to sequester all information, including e-mail messages and attachments, on any topic related to city business, including election filings and results.

"We have significantly reduced our search and retrieval time of e-mail requests," says Oceanside CIO Michael Lee Sherwood. "We recoup the money we spent to purchase and maintain the system if we use it for just a few requests a year. Since we process roughly 30 requests a year, and more in an election year, the ROI is tremendous."

Sherwood says election season keeps his team especially busy. "We see a significant increase in the number of public records requests in the days leading up to and following Election Day from citizens and the media," says Sherwood. "Before implementing VERITAS Enterprise Vault software to automatically archive all e-mails that pass through our Microsoft Exchange environment, the process of locating and recovering e-mails was extremely time consuming and expensive. The law requires that e-mails must be available to the public, and we want to maintain one-hundred percent compliance with that mandate and provide excellent service to our citizens."

Sherwood says that before installing the Enterprise Vault software, the city spent an inordinate amount of time, especially during election years, meeting public records requests. The city's e-mail retention policy was to simply copy e-mails and attachments onto back-up tapes, so a single public records request meant IT staffers had to retrieve boxes of tapes from an off-site location and spend days searching each tape for relevant files.

"Meeting a request that involved only a few e-mails could take anywhere from eight to 20 hours, so looking for month's worth of data could take weeks and often our records were not 100 percent complete," says Sherwood. "Because every employee managed his or her own e-mail account, messages and attachments that should have been saved were sometimes accidentally deleted."

Since implementing the Enterprise Vault software, all e-mails that pass through the city's Exchange environment are automatically indexed and stored in original format. The software also provides an efficient means to search the archive, retrieve messages and package the results quickly for inspection by the city attorney, who can then deliver them to the initial requestor.

About VERITAS Software

VERITAS Software, one of the 10 largest software companies in the world, is a leading provider of software to enable utility computing. In a utility computing model, IT resources are aligned with business needs and business applications are delivered with optimal performance and availability on top of shared computing infrastructure, minimizing hardware and labor costs. With 2003 revenues of $1.75 billion, VERITAS delivers products and services for data protection, storage & server management, high availability and application performance management that are used by 99 percent of the Fortune 500. More information about VERITAS Software can be found at www.veritas.com.

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