SMARTS Expands Incharge Product Line to Meet Service Management Challenges; InCharge Service Assurance Manager to Revolutionize $5 Billion Management Market.

Business Editors

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 4, 2001

SMARTS, the architect of the first fully automated service assurance solutions for enterprises and service providers, today unveiled InCharge Service Assurance Manager(TM) - the first industry solution able to manage the service delivery infrastructure in the context of services and the customers who use them.

InCharge Service Assurance Manager automatically correlates data and events from different domains within the infrastructure - including networks, servers, applications and databases - to diagnose authentic problems and to pinpoint their impacts on specific business services and users. SMARTS is introducing InCharge Service Assurance Manager at Supercomm 2001 and is offering live demonstrations at booth 1332.

"No other solution correlates complex data as intelligently and effectively as InCharge Service Assurance Manager," said Deborah Follett, director of operation systems and support for Radianz. "The product virtually eliminates human error and preserves high data integrity. With such accurate actionable information, we are able to eliminate problems that could affect service delivery quickly and efficiently. Radianz has been extremely pleased with the results and will be using InCharge in our next service enhancement."

Like all InCharge applications, Service Assurance Manager leverages intelligent analysis, adaptability to the managed environment, and automation to provide instant results. This is in contrast to legacy tools that require a substantial investment in writing rules that quickly become obsolete. InCharge Service Assurance Manager provides actionable information for sustaining service delivery and improving the user experience in real time. By automatically diagnosing infrastructure problems and linking them to the services and customers affected by them, InCharge Service Assurance Manager allows operations to exceed committed service levels.

"With InCharge Service Assurance Manager, valuable resources stay focused on solving authentic problems that threaten service delivery or that degrade user experience," explains Shaula Alexander Yemini, president of SMARTS. "This breakthrough solution enables corrective actions to be prioritized based on each problem's impacts on the business and its customers."

"We have strategically expanded the InCharge product suite to meet the increased productivity demands of our global enterprise and service provider customers," said Roger Pilc, chief operating officer of SMARTS. "We are seizing this market opportunity with unprecedented functionality that will put SMARTS in an ideal position to help our customers sustain service quality with accurate problem correction and immediate service restoration."

InCharge Service Assurance Manager extends the reach of SMARTS-patented technology to integrate and correlate the results of other InCharge applications that manage network, server, and application domains; the output of third-party managers; and customer and service information imported from provisioning databases.

The integration and correlation occurs in the context of the Service Assurance Manager Repository, a rich data model representing infrastructure objects services and customers and the relationships between them. The InCharge Global Console provides a business-level, interactive, command and control view of the results of analysis including diagnosis of authentic problems, the services and customers impacted by each problem, the magnitude of the impact, and the associated trouble ticket. Users can open trouble tickets and launch corrective actions directly from the console. This intelligent console replaces the console products of the last decade that present event data, leaving operations to perform the complex tasks of analysis of problems and their impacts manually

"Service providers are under mounting pressure to bring new services to market faster, while simultaneously trying to improve their quality and control costs. As a result, effective infrastructure management solutions are imperative," said Audrey Rasmussen, vice president of Boulder, Colo.-based industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates. "InCharge Service Assurance Manager puts the infrastructure management focus where it belongs: on the customers who use these services."

About SMARTS

SMARTS (System Management ARTS Incorporated) provides proactive management solutions for assuring service delivery to enterprises and service providers. These applications automatically map the infrastructure, monitor it and correlate the data across complex relationships to diagnose the authentic problem(TM). The InCharge suite of products works off the shelf to analyze key problems affecting performance and availability of today's infrastructure resulting in improved quality of service, and increased productivity of scarce resources such as experienced professionals. Included among the company's customers are Accenture, Ameritrade, AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Corning, CSC, FedEx, Reuters, Qwest and WorldCom. For more information, visit the SMARTS web site at http://www.smarts.com