EMC Equals E-Commerce For OfficeMax.

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 10, 1998--

EMC Helps OfficeMax Reduce Downtime Risks and Enables Safe

E-Commerce Deployment

EMC Corporation announced today that OfficeMax, Inc. (NYSE:OMX), the nation's largest operator of office products superstores, has selected EMC Enterprise Storage systems and advanced software to enhance information availability and streamline management of its rapidly growing catalog and electronic commerce business.

"With EMC Enterprise Storage, OfficeMax provides more continuous access to our mission-critical systems, which in turn improves customer satisfaction," said Michael Feuer, OfficeMax's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Our e-commerce site is always online, our call centers are open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and we operate 17 delivery centers around the country that guarantee next-day delivery. Any short period of system downtime may result in lost customers, revenue and profitability."

To support the growing need for around-the-clock information availability, OfficeMax has acquired Fibre Channel-connected EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and several EMC software solutions -- including EMC TimeFinder, EMC PowerPath and Symmetrix Manager.

OfficeMax, based in Cleveland, Ohio, will use EMC TimeFinder to transparently create a copy of production data, freeze it at a point in time, and allow parallel backup access to this data while productive work continues. TimeFinder will protect mission-critical applications, including a new SAP enterprise-wide business system running on Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 servers.

"Performing backups with TimeFinder while the systems are running will eliminate a significant portion of our planned outages," explained Feuer. "TimeFinder will let us run backups on a daily basis -- which is much more frequently than traditional backup methods allow. This increases systems uptime while gaining higher-quality backup copies, which protect us more fully against potential data loss.

"A consistent disk storage and backup strategy with EMC Enterprise Storage allows OfficeMax to better manage and safeguard data -- the value of which is rapidly increasing as more of our business goes online."

Skyrocketing Growth of Electronic Commerce Drives Storage Expansion

"In the last year, our Web business has grown dramatically," observed Feuer. "With this tremendous growth comes an explosion of data that needs to be stored and managed -- which is where EMC steps in. Consolidating our storage with EMC enables us to support the increasing number of platforms in our environment. A centralized approach lowers our overall management costs and improves utilization of our information assets."

The flexibility of EMC Enterprise Storage also is enabling OfficeMax to more easily manage the transition to a new infrastructure based on SAP, Oracle, as well as Sun, Hewlett Packard and NT servers.

Feuer noted, "We dramatically minimize the risk of change since incompatibility issues are virtually eliminated when we add new platforms."

Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels, said, "EMC Enterprise Storage is allowing strategically focused companies like OfficeMax to meet change and growth with confidence. With the flexibility of EMC Enterprise Storage, companies can avoid the risks these changes present and instead turn them into opportunities to improve customer service and generate even more growth."

About EMC and OfficeMax

EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate web site can be accessed at http://www.EMC.com.

Today, OfficeMax is the country's largest office products superstore chain as measured by number of stores and breadth of geographic coverage. The Company operates over 780 full-size superstores featuring over 8,000 office products, computers, business machines, and related items in more than 330 markets in 48 states and Puerto Rico. The Company also operates CopyMax and FurnitureMax, store-within-a-store modules devoted exclusively to print-for-pay services and office furniture, respectively. In addition, OfficeMax has 17 delivery centers throughout the United States to serve its catalog and direct marketing businesses. Through joint venture partnerships, OfficeMax operates superstores in Mexico and Japan, and recently announced its plans to enter the Brazil market through a third joint venture.

With the launch of OfficeMax Online(R) in 1995, OfficeMax became the first office products superstore retailer to sell products over the Internet. In addition to its vast product assortment, OfficeMax.com offers easy-to-use search and browse features, order tracking and usage reports, and customized express order templates. These features enable OfficeMax.com customers and businesses to efficiently buy a wide assortment of merchandise at http://www.officemax.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage, TimeFinder, and PowerPath are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.