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UXComm Announces AutonomIQ for Utility Management

Posted on: Monday, 14 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

BEAVERTON, Ore., June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- UXComm(TM), a leader in utility management software solutions for modular computing and communications, today announced the general availability of its flagship product suite, AutonomIQ(TM) for Utility Management. In concert with the product launch is the announcement of UXComm's Series A financing and the expansion of its executive management team with the addition of Mark Sigal as the company's chief executive officer. The AutonomIQ software suite provides businesses and infrastructure vendors with a cohesive family of management software products that addresses the unique management requirements of modular, utility computing environments.

A convergence of forces in business, including emerging business-on-demand initiatives, continued pressures to reduce costs, the ubiquity of standards- based Wintel and Lintel server platforms, and an increase in mainstream Web- based applications are giving rise to a new modular, service-oriented utility compute model. These new compute environments, made up of large numbers of ever-changing, diverse compute components, offer the promise of affordably delivering capacity-on-demand and the ability to continually align information technologies with business priorities. While the benefits of modular computing seem apparent, new and unforeseen management costs and complexities have surfaced that are driving the need for a new way to manage these dynamic modular environments.

"What's not to like? Customers consistently tell us flexible sourcing of commodity computing components, when coupled with 'plug and play' infrastructure deployments, is a strategic game-changer. It promises to reduce IT asset costs and improve availability and service delivery," said Mark Sigal, UXComm CEO. "While the benefits of modular computing to both infrastructure vendors and businesses seem obvious, customers tell us that without a fresh new approach to management, these very granular, dynamic environments quickly become unmanageable with legacy systems management tools and processes. UXComm understands the management requirements of these new environments from both the top-down and bottom-up perspective and is committed to delivering management solutions that meet the real-world requirements of customers."

AutonomIQ for Utility Management-a new way to manage today's modular,

compute world

The AutonomIQ family of products addresses the needs of modular, utility computing and delivers the industry's first cohesive suite of utility management software solutions that feature:

* Localized, policy-based autonomic server management that provides

applications with a logical interface for managing the underlying

server and system resources;

* Functionality that spans from "bare metal" to infrastructure to

provide granular visibility, correlation and control;

* Lifecycle management of one or many server instances, from deployment

and provisioning to upgrades and ongoing systems management, all of

which is coordinated by a lightweight internal policy engine;

* Open interoperability through form-factor and operating systems

agnosticism, legacy systems management, application interoperability,

and support of new and emerging standards, including Web services,

IPMI, HPI, WMI, SNMP, CIM/XML, SBLIM, and JDBC.

Powered by UXComm's Intelligent Agent Architecture(TM) (IA2 (TM)), the AuotnomIQ application suite exposes localized autonomic functions to any level within a server deployment. IA2 features small footprint, policy-driven agents that have the ability to reside anywhere within a modular datacenter topology from the blade to the chassis. The IA2 agents gather information from the elements to the aggregate infrastructure, and operate in isolation, hierarchically, or on a peer-to-peer basis. These agents are also adaptive in that they can use events to trigger dynamic policy generation. The IA2 agents assume many different roles and perform a variety of tasks, including protocol mediation, discovery, provisioning, intelligent filtering and resource virtualization-all fundamental ingredients for enabling autonomic management.

The AutonomIQ product suite is designed to provide an evolutionary path that scales from existing compute environments and management processes to fully virtualized utility computing. The suite includes: Distributed Element Management, Dynamic Server Provisioning Service Management, Server Virtualization, and an intuitive visual development environment for creating highly tailored workflow models. AutonomIQ for Distributed Element Management is currently available, with AutonomIQ for Dynamic Server Provisioning expected to be available by year-end, followed by the balance of the AutonomIQ offerings.

Investment

To fuel its growth, UXComm has recently closed a $7 million Series A financing round co-led by Foundation Capital and OVP Venture Partners, along with Intel Capital as an additional participant. As a part of this financing and in support of UXComm, Bill Elmore from Foundation Capital and David Chen from OVP Venture Partners have joined the UXComm board of directors, along with other board members that include Mark Sigal, CEO of UXComm, Rebecca Ward, CEO of Tealeaf, and Rob Gowans, co-founder, vice president of UXComm.

"New technologies enabling modular computing and service-oriented architectures are transforming the way businesses will architect and deploy their IT infrastructures moving forward," said Bill Elmore, general partner of Foundation Capital. "For these changes to deliver their true promise there simply must be a new approach to managing these environments. This is what UXComm provides, and in our due diligence with customers, their approach was strongly validated as solving the right problem."

Executive Management

Also announced today is the addition of Mark Sigal as president and chief executive officer of UXComm. Sigal brings 15 years of entrepreneurial experience to UXComm, having been affiliated with six start-ups, including Rapid Logic, a unified device management company that Sigal led as founding CEO through to its purchase by Wind River.

Just prior to UXComm, Sigal was co-founder of Verdada, an Internet dashboard software start-up. Prior to Verdada, he held a variety of leadership positions at businesses including The Middleband Group, a strategic product marketing consultancy, Tribe Communications (acquired by Zoom), an early packet switching pioneer, CafeNet, a public network of Internet access terminals, and Whistle Communications (acquired by IBM).

About UXComm, Inc.

Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, UXComm(TM) provides businesses and infrastructure vendors with a unified suite of utility management software products. Named AutonomIQ(TM), UXComm's product suite addresses the unique management requirements of modular, utility compute and communications environments. Delivering localized, policy-based autonomic server management functions that span from "bare metal" to infrastructure, AutonomIQ's patent-pending Intelligent Agent Architecture(TM) (IA2(TM)) provides business applications with a single logical management interface for managing the underlying server and system resources needed to power service-oriented compute environments.

UXComm's principal investors include Intel, Foundation Capital and OVP Venture Partners. UXComm actively participates in industry organizations that are leading the development and incorporation of new standards for the management of modular systems architectures and is an active participant in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Service Availability(TM) Forum (SA Forum). For more about UXComm or the AutonomIQ suite of products, please see http://www.uxcomm.com/.

UXComm, Inc.

CONTACT: Jeff Tyre, Director of Product Management of UXComm, Inc.,+1-503-748-6400, or jtyre@uxcomm.com

Web site: http://www.uxcomm.com/

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