Cybermation Announces ESP Workload Manager 5.3; More Flexibility and Control for Enterprise Workload.

Business/Technology Editors

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 7, 2001

Cybermation Inc., the leading developer of integrated enterprise systems management software, has announced the Early Availability of ESP Workload Manager V5R3.0, the company's flagship job scheduling and workload automation product. This latest release includes many new enhancements to ESP Workload Manager's powerful feature set, providing users increased flexibility and control in the scheduling and management of enterprise workload.

Cybermation has continued its commitment to developing its mainframe-centric enterprise workload management solutions, which are mission-critical for the company's many Fortune 500 customers. During the past 15 years, Cybermation has consistently provided new releases of ESP Workload Manager to keep pace with changing customer requirements.

"Our high standards for the evolution of our products ensures that we continue to make complex automation processes simple," commented chairman and chief technology architect, Ray Nissan. "Cybermation's leading-edge product development is unusual in the mainframe-centric world, and ESP 5.3 is no exception. It offers our growing user community significant performance improvements and provides a rapid return on investment."

Among the new features included in ESP Workload Manager 5.3 is an enhanced conversion process to help Cybermation's Professional Services team engage customers and replace their existing competitive product - typically well ahead of their most optimistic expectations. Other key functions include:

-- ESP Workstation enhancements, such as the new consolidated workstation server to allow connections to multiple ESP masters from one single workstation (graphical user interface) application as well as a single scoreboard scan and filtering enhancements. Installations with large workloads spread over multiple sites will experience considerable performance improvements.

-- An Agent Monitor to allow users to perform continuous monitoring to confirm availability of an ESP Agent. This feature is optional and can be implemented on a selected basis.

-- FTP enhancement, eliminating reliance on SMF record type 15 for all data set closures in favor of SMF record type 118 to differentiate between a successful and unsuccessful transmission and to feed back to ESP more information about the transmission via symbolic variables.

-- Global Variable Tables to introduce a new method for storing and retrieving global variables, complementing ESP's existing methods. This feature supports the creation of global variables, grouped into one or more global variable tables.

Steve Turpin, Director of Professional Services at Cybermation, added, "Our experienced in-house Professional Services team takes pride in its ability to manage the risk for our customers, guaranteeing our work and timeframe to deliver immediate results. Version 5.3 offers a variety of new features to convert customers to ESP Workload Manager, making our job - and theirs - easier than ever."

About ESP Workload Manager

ESP is a best-of-breed job scheduling and workload management solution used in data centers worldwide to automate batch workload and manage system resources. First released in 1987, ESP provides the robustness and performance needed for mission-critical applications, automating operations across multiple operating systems including OS/390(R), UNIX(R) (e.g., AIX(R), HP-UX(R) and Solaris(R)), Windows NT(R), OS/400(R) and others.

With ESP, automating all scheduling tasks across the enterprise refocuses valuable data-center resources on exception management and improved application development capabilities to enhance competitive advantage. Users typically experience returns within weeks or months - even if they already had an automated scheduling solution in place.

ESP Workload Manager 5.3 will be generally available in July. For more information, contact Cybermation at [phone] or www.cybermation.com.

About Cybermation

Cybermation Inc. is recognized by its many Fortune 500 customers as a leading developer of best-of-breed automation solutions for job scheduling, workload management and software change management for heterogeneous computing environments and for its systems management expertise. The company's products include ESP Workload Manager(R) for enterprise-wide job scheduling and workload management for OS/390(R), UNIX(R), Windows NT(R) and OS/400(R) operating systems as well as for SAP R/3, Oracle and PeopleSoft ERP environments; ESP Workstation graphical user interface for enterprise scheduling from a single point of control; ESP Encore(R) for automated rerun, restart and recovery; ESP Console Manager(R) for console automation; and Alchemist, a powerful, automated change management system that provides real benefits for both software development and data-center production environments. Cybermation's customers include Hudson's Bay Company, Statistics Canada, and CN Rail in Canada, Allstate Insurance, JC Penney, Nike, Deere & Co. and Verizon in the United States, and One 2 One, Sony Europe, VHV and Janssen Pharmaceutica in Europe. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and has offices throughout the United States, England and Australia.