Countrywide Financial Selects Troux Technologies for Strategic IT Management; Troux Platform Provides Complete Visibility into Highly Diversified, Multi-Vendor Environment.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 26, 2004

Troux(TM) Technologies, the leading provider of strategic IT Management software, today announced that Countrywide Financial Corporation is deploying the Troux platform to effectively manage change within its diversified, decentralized infrastructure. Countrywide, through its family of companies is a leading diversified financial services provider with a centralized IT operations organization managing network, servers and infrastructure, web hosting, security, business continuity, and change control and management. The centralized IT organization works in partnership with business units that are responsible for application development and deployment. Countrywide is using Troux's strategic IT management platform to create an integrated view of their diversified, disparate enterprise environments that is aligned with their business processes - providing complete visibility into both enterprise IT and business architectures for all business units.

Countrywide's centralized IT service teams deal with complexity on a daily basis, supporting multiple lines of business whose focus is service delivery through innovative technology. Richard Jones, Chief Information Officer for Countrywide recently discussed the growing need to move from simple data collection to delivering actual IT intelligence. "Countrywide is one of the fastest growing companies in America. Our IT infrastructure has had to grow to keep pace with that business growth, while continuing to maintain reliable, complete, and up-to-date information regarding the configuration of our systems. This goes from a high level expression of the core business processes supporting the business, to the application components and applications providing those business functions, to every aspect of the network, server, storage, and database infrastructure supporting those applications. Utilizing Troux's collector and blueprinting technology, we have successfully assembled all the pieces in order to deliver complete intelligence regarding our computing environment, including full end-to-end mapping of the business to IT relationship."

"In order to successfully plan and manage change in a decentralized organization, we needed a current and accurate understanding of our complex IT environment," said Kheder Baykal, Manager, Enterprise Change Management for Countrywide. "The manual processes we were using to collect and maintain information about our systems were very time consuming and subject to inaccuracies. In our initial implementation of the Troux platform, we found that we could automatically gain visibility into the components that make up our IT environment, their interdependencies, and the relationships they have to the business processes they support. This gives us the IT baseline we need to successfully plan and manage change."

With the Troux platform, Countrywide will be able to automatically discover assets, attributes, and their interdependencies from numerous IT data sources. With this information, Troux will perform impact analysis on proposed changes that can be used to prioritize changes and avoid conflicts. The platform will also streamline authorization processes, ensuring that all changes receive pre-authorization, and it will automatically maintain an audit change history, providing a record of change that can be used for planning and support. "Until the roadmap of relationships from the core infrastructure all the way through the application layer to the specific business processes is fully understood, impact analysis is immature at best. Troux has allowed us to take the next step in the evolution of risk mitigation and recovery," said Craig Stauffer, First Vice President of Countrywide's System Process Engineering group.

"Improperly managed change can result in unexpected side effects - such as downtime and rollbacks that can cost millions of dollars in rework," said Craig Dalton, Director of Troux's Change Analysis practice. "With a complex environment, the ability to prioritize change, visualize change scenarios, and predict the impact of "to-be" states will typically return millions of dollars in less downtime and lower support costs."

In addition to change management, Countrywide intends to extend Troux's Strategic IT Management platform to help solve business continuity planning and enterprise architecture management issues.

About Countrywide

Founded in 1969, Countrywide Financial Corporation is a member of the S&P 500, Forbes 500 and Fortune 500. Through its family of companies, Countrywide provides mortgage banking and diversified financial services in domestic and international markets. Mortgage banking businesses include loan production and servicing principally through Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., which originates, purchases, securitizes, sells, and services primarily prime-quality loans. Also included in Countrywide's mortgage banking segment is the LandSafe group of companies that provide loan closing services. Diversified financial services encompass capital markets, banking, insurance, and global, largely through the activities of Countrywide Capital Markets, a mortgage-related investment banker; Countrywide Bank, a division of Treasury Bank, NA, a banking entity offering customers CDs, money market accounts, and home loan products; Balboa Life and Casualty Group, whose companies are national providers of property, liability, and life insurance; Balboa Reinsurance, a captive mortgage reinsurance company; and Global Home Loans, a European mortgage banking joint venture in which Countrywide holds a majority interest. For more information about the Company, visit Countrywide's website at www.countrywide.com.

About Troux

Troux Technologies (pronounced "True") is the leading provider of strategic IT management software and solutions that bridge the gap between IT and business architectures - seamlessly linking IT infrastructure with business goals and processes. The Troux platform provides a complete integrated view of the end-to-end enterprise IT environment that supports a CIOs' highest-priority strategic initiatives and increases the value IT delivers to its business customers.

Troux solutions combine best practices with the Troux platform enabling CIOs to transition their organizations from an operational focus to create strategic IT excellence. A well-established base of leading Global 2000 customers in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, consumer goods and pharmaceuticals, are using the Troux platform and solutions to transform the role of IT, improve IT infrastructure/business alignment, minimize business and operational risk, and increase business value. For more information on the Troux platform and Troux solutions, please visit www.troux.com, or call Troux Technologies at 512-536-6270.

Copyright 2004 Troux Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Troux, Troux 3.0, Troux 4.0, Troux Blueprinting System, Troux IT Portal, Troux Service Solutions and Troux Collectors are trademarks of Troux Technologies, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks of their respective companies.