Jacksonville Electric Authority Powers Enterprise With Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 1998--

Florida's Largest Public Electric And Water Utility Chooses CA's

End-To-End Management Software Over Solutions From IBM/Tivoli

And HP

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA), Florida's largest municipally-owned electric power and water utility, has standardized on CA's Unicenter TNG to manage and ensure the availability of critical systems across its heterogeneous computing environment. Unicenter TNG was chosen over IBM/Tivoli's TME and numerous other solutions after a 7-month product evaluation and planning process.

"Unicenter TNG will allow the Jacksonville Electric Authority to cope with the rapid changes and challenges that characterize today's utility industry," said Charles Bayless, JEA systems project leader. "We needed to monitor and manage everything seamlessly, and Unicenter TNG was the clear choice for end-to-end control of our IT enterprise."

According to Bayless, the need for an integrated, end-to-end IT management solution arose from JEA's recent migration to a distributed, open-architectured computing infrastructure. JEA has implemented a modern client/server environment to replace mission-critical legacy applications residing on its IBM and Unisys mainframes.

In a little more than two years, the utility's IT environment has grown from two mainframes, 40 Novell servers, and 950 PCs to more than 1,500 desktops, 60 Windows NT servers, 30 Novell servers, and four HP 9000 K-class systems. JEA's end-users are interconnected via regional ATM, TCP/IP and Novell NetWare IPX networks.

"We had to find a complete IT management solution that would help us improve services for more than 340,000 electric power customers, 170,000 water services customers and 120,000 sewer services customers while maintaining a strict employment cap," said Bayless. "Unicenter TNG has enabled us to keep IT staff levels relatively stable throughout the entire IT modernization process. It has provided a means to work smarter with the people we have, and to do a better job in the process."

During the course of its product evaluation, the JEA narrowed the field to a few products, which included those from CA, IBM/Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard. "We needed a solution that was extensible across a wide variety of platforms and operating systems, and CA's Unicenter TNG proved to have the greatest extensibility," said Bayless. "IBM/Tivoli's TME met only part of our requirements, and we were not confident that they would still be a player in two or three years. HP's IT Operations product simply did not fit our business direction as well as Unicenter TNG."

Unicenter TNG was also favored for its superior workload management, scheduling and event monitoring capabilities. "We rely heavily on Unicenter TNG's event management console to monitor and respond proactively to system events and alarms," said Bayless. "The broad functionality of Unicenter TNG continues to validate our decision to go with CA technology."

LAN management capabilities were another major factor in the JEA's decision. Its IT staff has configured Unicenter TNG to generate pager calls and emails to support personnel if events occur that require intervention. The JEA is also replacing its Remedy Corp. help desk with Unicenter TNG's Advanced Help Desk (AHD) to extend support capabilities.

In addition to the technical management capabilities afforded by Unicenter TNG, Bayless' IT group appreciates Unicenter TNG's ease-of-use, which enables management and other non-technical staff to leverage the product's benefits. "We really like Unicenter TNG's Business Process Views capability," said Bayless. "We have configured the software to show the status of key applications, as well as their related network and system resources, to assist business managers throughout the company."

JEA will also be leveraging the advanced storage management capabilities of CA's ARCserve to routinely back up LAN server hard drives to a StorageTek 9710 Tape Librarian. "We did an evaluation of our Windows NT and Novell server storage management requirements and selected ARCserve as our enterprise storage management product," said Bayless. "Because ARCserve is fully integrated with Unicenter TNG, we can get complete scheduling, monitoring and progress reports for all our storage management activities."

Based on the success of the Unicenter TNG rollout, the JEA is now looking to expand the capabilities of the solution to meet other company needs. Within the next month, the utility is planning to deploy Unicenter TNG's Asset Management and Software Delivery components to assist in managing its Windows 95 desktops company-wide.

Bayless' group has written a special Unicenter TNG software agent to monitor the health of its real-time data historian. The Planet Information (PI) product from OSI Software that Bowater had been using did not have the enterprise management integration capabilities required, and OSI was not planning to address the issue until an unspecified future release. Using the Unicenter TNG Agent Factory Software Development Kit (SDK), Bayless' group wrote an agent that allows it to monitor and manage the health of the system. "This agent allows the JEA to fully manage the PI system without dedicating a full-time human administrator, which seems to be what everyone else does," said Bayless.

Bowater is currently writing Unicenter TNG software agents to monitor power plant processes and commercial customer power meters. These solutions will help reduce maintenance costs by immediately identifying process upsets and service interruptions, and notifying field crews so the problems can be repaired promptly and efficiently. "By providing such capabilities, Unicenter TNG is helping us achieve the highest returns on our technology investment," said Bayless.

Unicenter TNG is an integrated enterprise management solution that enables organizations to manage all IT resources, encompassing heterogeneous networks, systems, applications, and databases. It provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for TCP/IP, SNA, IPX/SPX and DECnet networks, and 40 platforms including desktops, Windows NT, UNIX, AS/400, NetWare and mainframe environments.

Unicenter TNG is the only fully integrated management solution covering network discovery, topology, performance, events and status, security, software distribution, storage, workload, help desk, change management and other functions for traditional and distributed computing environments, as well as for the Internet and intranets. Unicenter TNG's intelligent manager/agent technology delivers highly scalable management of the entire computing environment, including hardware and software.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 11,000 people in 160 offices in 43 countries and had revenue of $4.5 billion in calendar year 1997. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing [e-mail], or calling 1-516-342-5224.

The Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA) owns, operates and manages the electric system established by the City of Jacksonville in 1895. Compared to other municipally-owned electric utilities, the JEA is Florida's largest and the eighth largest in the United States. JEA currently serves more than 340,000 customers in Jacksonville and parts of three adjacent counties. For more information about Jacksonville Electric Authority, visit their web site at http://www.jea.com. -0- All product names referenced are the trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Kathy Gargano, [phone] or [e-mail]