VERITAS, ORACLE AND SUN FORM STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

Industry leaders, VERITAS Software Corporation, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems Inc, announced a three-way strategic alliance to provide a set of wellintegrated, high-quality services. The companies are also working together to jointly develop validated configurations to help their customers rapidly build more robust e-business infrastructures. This VERITAS, Oracle and Sun (VOS) initiative focuses dedicated resources in three areas: problem resolution and escalation via a Joint Escalation Center (JEC), joint development and testing, professional services and education. As a result, this initiative allows customers to more rapidly deploy infrastructures with higher confidence.

"Buyers of high performance business solutions require two dimensions of integration. Not only do the vendors need to merge technology components, but they also must procedurally collaborate on behalf of customers across the life cycle of the solution, including testing, packaging, deployment, support and root cause analysis," said Tony Adams, Senior Analyst, Dataquest IT Services Group. "The co-location of senior technical personnel and supporting infrastructure within a single facility is an advanced strategy enabling customers and vendors alike to confidently reap the full benefit of multivendor IT solutions."

Joint Escalation Center

A VERITAS, Oracle and Sun Joint Escalation Center (JEC) has been established to provide a single-source of expertise, coordinated support and problem resolution, previously unavailable in the industry. Located in a single facility, the JEC is staffed by senior support engineers from VERITAS, Oracle and Sun who report, through a common organizational structure, to a customersupport executive committee representing the three companies. The JEC is chartered with providing faster, more cohesive problem resolution for the companies' mutual customers who have purchased the appropriate level of support from each company. As a result, customers may receive accelerated resolution for interoperability issues escalated by any one of the three participant companies.

Validated Configurations

VERITAS Software, Oracle and Sun have jointly tested two configurations to provide tightly integrated products that are quick and easy to deploy. The parties have optimized and tested key components to provide a high level of system availability and manageability. The three companies have documented two validated configurations and intend to deliver up to five additional configurations and recommended services to support these configurations, which are expected by the end of the year.

The current validated configurations consist of:

• Sun Solaris Operating Environment, Sun Enterprise servers and Sun StorEdge arrays
• Oracle database
• VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS File System including Oracle specific modules

Unified Consulting Services

The companies are also working together to create a unified consulting services program called "VERITAS, Oracle and Sun (VOS) Foundation Services," which is expected to feature two key offerings. It is anticipated that the first offering, an Availability Assessment Service, will deliver a gap analysis report to customers, pinpointing areas for availability improvement. The second offering, a Platform Development Service, is expected to provide coordinated architectural design and implementation efforts to assist customers as they deploy improvements to their e-business infrastructure.

Availability

The JEC is currently operational. The two initial validated configurations are scheduled to be available by the end of May 2000. The VOS Foundation Services are available immediately.

This announcement builds upon the recently announced Sun iForce initiative and Oracle's E-Business Continuity program. The Sun iForce initiative is designed to bring together under one umbrella all of Sun's dot-com programs, products, services and solutions aimed at customers ranging from startups to large enterprises. The Oracle E-Business Continuity program defines the products, services and practices for creating highly available, secure, high performance e-business processes. Working in conjunction with partners such as VERITAS and Sun, Oracle has defined a spectrum of technologies and methods for protecting businesses from system failures, disaster scenarios and various types of planned and unplanned downtime.

For more information on the VERITAS, Oracle and Sun (VOS) initiative please visit: www.vosinitiative.com or www.oracle.com/tellmemore/?205073.

About Oracle

Oracle Corporation provides the software that powers the Internet. For more information about Oracle, please call 650-506-7000.

About Sun Microsystems Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- The Network Is The Computer -- has propelled SunMicrosystems Inc, to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. With $14.2 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.

About VERITAS Software

For enterprise customers that demand the continuous availability of businesscritical information, VERITAS Software Corporation, an industry leading enterprise-class application storage management software provider, helps to ensure information availability from business-critical applications by delivering integrated cross-platform storage management software solutions. The Company's products enable Business Without Interruption and are designed to protect, access and manage business-critical application information. VERITAS Software products are delivered through a worldwide direct sales force and a network of resellers and OEM partners in North America, Europe, AsiaPacific and Japan. The company's corporate headquarters is located at 1600 Plymouth Street, Mountain View, CA 94043. Telephone 650-335-8000. Fax 650-335- 8050. E-mail vx-sales@veritas.com. WWW site: www.veritas.com/.

VERITAS, Oracle, Sun Initiative Customer Quotes

Steve Whitaker Manager, Enterprise UNIX Services Texas Instruments Incorporated

"I am pleased to see unified support from VERITAS, Oracle and Sun. Some of our business solutions require integrated IT deployments using products from each of the three companies. By offering service solutions like coordinated IT consulting and validated configurations, VERITAS, Oracle and Sun will help reduce our system development costs while increasing availability. I applaud the companies' efforts to team and look forward to seeing the initiative continue to grow."

David Bickley vice president, IT Services Texas Instruments Incorporated

"I think the joint service initiative from VERITAS, Oracle and Sun is a great idea. Issues will always arise when integrating heterogeneous products, but when different vendors actually integrate their own products and offer benefits like validated configurations and seamless 24x7 coordinated support, we can anticipate reduced support issues and costs, especially when migrating to new releases. What's more, we can reduce system triage time and increase availability."

Robert Peterson senior vice president & CIO OfficeMax Inc.

"A validated configuration from Sun, VERITAS and Oracle can improve system availability and lower costs, since skilled IT professionals integrate the products and solve issues before deployment in production environments. And, different companies don't have to devote scarce IT resources to solve the same problems.

"Validated configurations provide a common environment that can be used at multiple sites and at different companies -- making it easier to compare and analyze differences in performance, stability and availability."

Web site: www.vosinitiative.com.