INVIO UNVEILS NEW ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE FOR AUTOMATION OF NETWORKED STORAGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES.

Invio Software, Inc. has announced its new product line: the Invio Storage Practice Manager, Invio Active Practices and the Invio Storage Practice Foundry. Invio will make its company debut and unveil its products at the Storage Management 2002 Conference in Chicago, March 20-22, 2002.

Invio Software is led by President and CEO Ranga Rangachari, who most recently was a General Manager and Vice President for enterprise storage management software leader Legato Systems. In addition to Rangachari, each member of Invio's executive team brings more than 15 years of experience in the enterprise software market.

Rangachari founded Invio to drive down the high cost of managing networked storage, which can reach as much as seven to ten times the amount spent on storage hardware. His envisioned solution: software to automate these mission critical processes.

"Automation is a 'must have' for well managed, cost effective networked storage," said Marc Farley, industry consultant author of Building Storage Networks. "Companies need a way to automate the end to end process and support all the people involved -- not just individual system components. Invio is the first company to recognize this need and deliver enterprise-class software to meet it."

For years, IT organizations have invested in enterprise software to automate business processes such as production, distribution and customer care. The result: Greatly improved quality and responsiveness of business execution. In contrast, managing the IT infrastructure itself remains a labor-intensive and fragmented process.

"Pursuing the same benefits accrued from business process automation, businesses are now seeking to integrate and automate the critical IT process of managing their networked storage environments," said Rangachari. "While networked storage hardware provides the necessary infrastructure to support major gains in management efficiency, automation software is the catalyst that allows these gains to be fully realized."

"Automating our practices for SAN management helps accelerate the benefit of new technology while minimizing the risk and complexity. It's a key to maintaining a high level of responsiveness to user requests for service," said Kurt Wong, Director of Storage Engineering for VISA subsidiary, Inovant. "Invio allows you to roll out new systems and services to your users, here, or around the world, and get it right the first time."

Invio will unveil three new software products for storage practice automation. The offerings have been in development since 2000, and are currently in beta deployment within several major enterprises in North America. General availability is scheduled for Q2 this year.

Invio Storage Practice Manager: Integrates and transforms networked storage management practices into an automated process. Storage management practices encompass the policies, user activities, system processes and workflow by which you deliver information management services across your storage network. Through automation, Practice Manager increases the quality, consistency and responsiveness of practice execution.

Invio Active Practices: Pre-built modules that encapsulate industry best practices for storage management as reusable software. When configured to your specific environment, Active Practices enable Practice Manager to execute processes in a consistent, repeatable fashion -- leveraging your unique infrastructure and conforming to your specific management policies.

Invio Storage Practice Foundry: Provides a complete development environment to create new Active Practices and extend Practice integration to unique software and hardware components of your storage infrastructure. The Practice Foundry enables you to leverage investment in existing infrastructure and rapidly capitalize on technology and practice innovation.

"We were looking for a big reduction in the reactive, repetitive tasks that bog down our people," said Larry Peterson, Vice President, Corporate Technical Services, Gelco Information Network. "Invio automates those tasks to free up time for our key technical people to focus on proactive ways to make our networked storage environment better, faster, more reliable and scalable."

The ultimate vision for networked storage is the storage utility, where applications "plug in" to a centrally managed pool of resources, to directly receive information management services. This model promises compelling gains to IT organizations in the form of higher application availability, economies of scale and economies of management centralization.

To help companies realize this vision Invio differs sharply from traditional approaches. Other vendors offer administrative tools that focus on a single product or step in the overall management process. In contrast, Invio provides an enterprise application that automates the entire end-to-end process according to your best practices -- interacting with system components and management tools to deliver services across your networked storage infrastructure, all the way to your applications. In addition, Invio enables automated processes that cross-organizational boundaries -- while supporting the administrator /consumer user relationships inherent to shared information storage services.

"Extending storage services to the user in a manageable self-service model is what the storage utility is all about," said Lou Gasco, Director of Applications Development, MetLife. "Higher IT productivity and more satisfied users is the goal. Invio automates processes that link applications with storage services to make this possible."

By providing a tool independent, cross platform automation environment -- Invio embraces and extends customer investment in existing tools and infrastructure, rather than forcing their replacement. Invio's open architecture supports networked storage management as a mission-critical business process and allows Invio's customers to quickly address high pain areas, then rapidly add incremental function to capitalize on technology innovation.

"Automating networked storage is about getting different systems and departments to work together," said Steve Duplessie, Founder, Enterprise Storage Group. "Where heterogeneity is a fact of life, customers will gravitate to independent software vendors. I think this plays to Invio's advantage."