Deltanet Uses Boole & Babbage MainView to Drill Down to the Root of S/390 Management Issues at Delta Dental.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 1999--

MainView Provides Automated Resolution of Potential Problems,

Reducing Costs Associated with Management and Downtime

Boole & Babbage(R), Inc. (Nasdaq:BOOL), the leader in application service level management for distributed systems, today announced that Deltanet, the information services (IS) data processing center for several Delta Dental locations nationwide (the largest of which is Delta Dental of California), has selected MainView(R) to manage its S/390 enterprise.

MainView will provide management, detection and automated resolution of potential problems that could affect the performance of the Deltanet systems, and availability of the business-critical applications that support its customers. With MainView, Deltanet can resolve problems before end-users become affected.

Deltanet's applications are complex, built to provide customers with maximum features and functions to support their business requirements. Its production environment includes a custom CICS VSAM-based central claims processing application, and the CICS IDMS-based DentiCal claims processing application, both running on S/390 systems. Deltanet has over 500 MIPS dedicated to these core applications, supporting all of the Delta Dental customer locations.

"We needed a solution that could help us quickly identify trouble conditions before users would be affected and the help desk notified of a problem," said Jim Gregg, senior project manager at Deltanet. "MainView allows us to proactively manage our systems, preventing outages before they occur."

Gregg explained: "When a system is a little sluggish, MainView reaches in and drills down to find the problem. We have preset thresholds so that when, for example, a CPU reaches a certain level we are immediately notified before its threshold is exceeded, then we can take action or MainView can automatically resolve the problem."

MainView provides a high-level, graphical view of the overall performance of Deltanet's systems. Its powerful management capabilities allow IT personnel to spend more time on work that requires greater skill, such as systems' tuning. The easy-to-use, graphical views can be customized to best meet the needs of the organization. MainView also provides the ability to collect statistics to troubleshoot frequent problem areas.

The systems programming team at Deltanet, with a wide variety of expertise in management solutions, evaluated many offerings. "MainView proved to have the depth of functionality we needed in order to significantly lower management costs," said Gregg. "Boole & Babbage has a good reputation in the industry and is well-known for the strength of its products, service, support and pricing. All of this contributed to our decision to go with MainView."

Deltanet is growing, and with this growth Gregg and his team are looking at better ways to support their customers in the coming millennium. They are investigating a possible move to Parallel Sysplex and are also investigating ways that they can offer secured Web access to the mainframe. Gregg said that they are using MainView InTune to tune all the applications after they have been altered to meet Y2K specifications; they also use this product to tune new applications to ensure they run at peak performance.

"We are pleased that companies like Deltanet are having such positive experiences with MainView, and believe that this is what accounts for its continued strong growth," said Chris O'Connell, senior director of product marketing at Boole & Babbage. "About 40% of the 12,000 companies running S/390 today are using the MainView management solution. Out of those, approximately 1,000 have gone to a Parallel Sysplex configuration, and this figure is set to triple within the next couple years. Therefore, it is vitally important that these companies are armed with the best management solutions possible."

About MainView

MainView provides application- and workload-focused performance monitoring, helping system programmers to control service levels. MainView online monitoring provides point-and-shoot navigation, concurrent multi-system access, and Single System Image for viewing data from multiple processing regions or a Parallel Sysplex as a single entity. MainView products for OS/390, CICS, IMS, DBCTL and DB2 are the only fully integrated systems management tools available that can concurrently support Parallel Sysplex and traditional mainframe environments.

About Deltanet

Deltanet was created in 1975 and has grown to be the nation's largest processor of dental claims by combining the most advanced data processing technology with a commitment to superior customer service and support. Deltanet is an organization committed to developing software alternatives specifically for health care businesses. Its mission is to provide superior business solutions for customers through appropriate technologies and exceptional customer service. Today, with a staff of over three hundred and fifty professionals, Deltanet is meeting the dental claims processing needs of the health care industry.

About Boole & Babbage

Boole & Babbage is a worldwide leader in application service level management for distributed systems. Its Enterprise Automation product lines provide a management solution for the entire IT enterprise that encompasses systems, applications, middleware, databases and Web technologies. The Boole & Babbage set of solutions is currently used by large manufacturing companies, domestic and international government agencies, the majority of the world's largest financial institutions, airlines, IT outsourcers and utilities to improve service levels and reduce IT management costs. Founded in 1967, Boole & Babbage is the oldest publicly traded software vendor in the systems management industry with revenues of $226 million in calendar 1998, 970 employees and 43 offices in 26 countries. Corporate headquarters are located in San Jose, California. For more information, visit us on the Web at www.boole.com, or call 800/544-2152.

Boole & Babbage, Inc. is a Tivoli (NYSE:IBM) premiere partner, a Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP) premier partner, an IBM (NYSE:IBM) BESTeam Member, and a Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) Solutions Developer.

Note to Editors: Boole & Babbage and MainView are registered trademarks of Boole & Babbage, Inc. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.