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Contact Alan Hall on 01293 403636

or e-mail alan@scl.com

SCL Announces the Release of MKS AlertCentre 2.0

Crawley, Sussex November 25, 2002 – SCL announced today MKS AlertCentre 2.0, the latest version of its advanced, agentless monitoring solution for Windows. The release includes significant enhancements including monitoring wizards for Microsoft IIS, SQL Server, and Exchange that dramatically reduce the effort necessary to set up comprehensive management of essential applications and their infrastructures. AlertCentre 2.0 will enable customers to improve availability of critical resources such as websites, databases, and e-mail servers while substantially reducing system management costs.

MKS AlertCentre 2.0 is a cost-effective availability management solution for several reasons. First, it permits the monitoring of unlimited devices and applications from each licensed monitoring station. In addition, there are no limits on the number of users that can access AlertCentre either locally or remotely. Most importantly, its agentless architecture means there is no software to deploy to monitored devices, which leads to major savings in both deployment costs and ongoing administration costs.

"We produce live content over the Web, which our members around the world depend on so our information infrastructure has to be highly available and reliable," said Rod Bergen, Chairman of Men of Vision. "AlertCentre enables us to ensure the high availability we need and to do it affordably, because it leverages the expertise of our systems people and makes them more productive.".

New features in MKS AlertCentre 2.0 include:

• Application Monitoring Wizards: New application wizards for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), and Microsoft SQL Server make it a breeze to set up sophisticated, comprehensive monitoring for these ubiquitous products. These mission-critical applications depend on diverse IT resources from network connectivity to hardware plus a broad range of software services. Each wizard automatically discovers infrastructure and application elements for any server that supports one or more of these popular products and then it automatically generates the full range of system and application monitors necessary to comprehensively manage them for availability and performance.
• Status of Operations Console: All new, web-based, at-a-glance status of operations console with point and click drill down, and toolbar and status frames puts availability management at your fingertips. AlertCentre 2.0 carries this highly functional, easy-to-use interface theme throughout.
• New Monitor Types: for SNMP devices, UDP ports, incoming and outgoing e-mail services, printers/copiers, files, directories, machine shares, SSL certificates, newsgroups, web site link integrity, and database queries. These new monitor types expand the depth of network and application monitoring.
• New Action Functionality: ability to: 1) more fully control when and how actions can be triggered; 2) run pre and post action commands or programs; 3) start, stop and re-start services; 4) full functionality SNMP Trap and SNMP Set to enable seamless integration with other network and systems management products.
• Reports: Uptime Reports, Status of Operations Reports, Monitor Log Reports, and Configuration Reports. These pre-defined reports allow you to measure availability of all monitored networks, systems and applications.

"MKS AlertCentre 2.0 provides IT managers with a powerful tool to cost effectively improve availability and performance of essential systems and applications," said Pat Higbie, EVP, MKS, Inc. "The new application monitoring wizards make existing IT staff savvier in implementing successful availability monitoring solutions, because they automatically discover application infrastructure and they automatically generate monitors to ensure high availability of virtual resources such as web sites that depend on more infrastructure than meets the eye."

MKS, MKS Source Integrity, MKS Integrity Manager, MKS Integrity Solution, MKS Toolkit and MKS AlertCentre are trademarks or registered trademarks of MKS Inc. All other trademarks mentioned in this release are the property of their respective owners.