New Business Unit Provides Assessment, Design and Lifecycle Management of Customers' IT and Communications Infrastructure

STRATUSWORLD/LAS VEGAS, March 27, 2006 – Stratus Technologies today announced its Solutions Services Group, a strategic global business unit that helps customers ensure business continuity by creating crash-resistant IT and communications infrastructures. Building upon Stratus’ 25 years of expertise in continuous availability technology, the Solutions Services Group (SSG) consults with clients to assess, design, implement and manage end-to-end IT availability solutions and converged telecommunications solutions.

Stratus is launching the Solutions Services Group just as companies in every industry face pressure to guarantee their technology systems’ integrity. Product safety, regulatory compliance, privacy protection, cost reduction, and competitive advantage have made data availability, reliability, accessibility and security a business imperative.

"For an information system to deliver business value, it must be available," said Sri Sridharan, SSG vice president. "Availability is defined by the user of IT services and not by the collective performance attributes of the underlying components. We help clients achieve service-level metrics as they define them, and to sustain and improve availability over the life of the service. Preserving business continuity and data integrity has assumed much urgency in many companies and organizations, extending even to policies of corporate governance. Our services have a great deal to offer in this regard."

In a recent presentation, "Best Practices for Continuous Application Availability" (Gartner 24th Annual Data Center Conference, December 5-8, 2005), Gartner observed that business processes’ increasing reliance on IT and the pervasive ideal of the real-time enterprise will continue to drive the trend toward around-the-clock availability. The complexity of today’s IT infrastructures and applications makes it difficult to manage these systems to high levels of availability. To achieve continuous availability, enterprises must have a multi-pronged strategy that addresses application architecture, technology infrastructure, and IT process maturity, according to Gartner.

With continuous-availability assurance as its singular focus, Stratus can provide insight and professional expertise typically not resident in most companies, nor an area of service emphasis found in traditional IT infrastructure or business process consulting firms. Stratus has dedicated itself to supporting mission-critical applications in business, financial, and government organizations since 1980. In the global telecommunications infrastructure where continuous availability is presumed, Stratus has been a consistent innovator of server-based network solutions and services for more than 20 years.

Stratus Continuous Availability (CA) Framework
Stratus' Solutions Services Group delivery methodology is embodied in its Stratus CA Framework, a holistic approach to reducing the cost, complexity and risk of running and managing a continuously available application environment throughout its lifecycle. In Stratus’ view, three major areas, or "availability pillars," each have equally important roles in creating a continuously available service/application environment:

• Infrastructure Integrity – assessing and structuring IT and communications to support continuous availability of essential business processes

• Performance Assurance – using remote managed services, service management, and availability dashboards to assure data security, integrity, and accessibility

• Lifecycle Management – proactive monitoring and evaluations for continuous improvement

For each of the availability pillars that comprise the CA Framework, SSG marshals the most appropriate skills from a combination of internal and external resources at its disposal to assess availability risks within the infrastructure and to make recommendations for improvement. The group will also take responsibility for managing implementation, sourcing technology providers and product, installing and deploying the recommended solution, as well as ongoing infrastructure monitoring, change process management, and periodic reviews.

SSG has completed consulting engagements for clients worldwide in telecommunications, public safety, pharmaceutical manufacturing, retail, Internet services, distribution and others. In all cases, clients first contracted with SSG for an availability assessment of the IT infrastructure supporting a critical business process or disaster recovery process. A variety of additional SSG services were then provided according to the needs and capabilities of each individual client.

"The Solutions Services Group addresses customers’ issues of availability pain and availability risk, and we are prepared to assist clients as much or as little as individual situations call for because each situation is unique," said Greg Enriquez, Stratus senior vice president, Worldwide Field Operations. "Selling industry-leading fault-tolerant servers remains a strategic part of Stratus’ business, not to mention a source of formidable intellectual know-how. SSG is a natural and complementary evolution of our overall business model in that it is focused on solving availability concerns and challenges in the best way possible."

About Stratus Technologies
Stratus Technologies is a global solutions provider focused exclusively on helping its customers achieve and sustain the availability of information systems that support their critical business processes. Based upon its 25 years of expertise in server and services technology for continuous availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, life sciences, telecommunications, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries.

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