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COMPANIES JOIN TO FORM TSANet MULTIVENDOR SUPPORT COMMUNITY

TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network) has announced that a group of technical companies has come together to form a support community for mission-critical customers. Original sponsoring companies participating in the relationship include CNT, Cognos Inc, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Network Appliance, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Unisys, and Veritas. Additional companies are expected to join in the relationship as it gains momentum in the industry. This is the third enterprise-level support community TSANet has formed. The Microsoft Datacenter Community was formed in September of 2001, and the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA's) Supported Solutions Forum (SSF) support community was implemented in January of 2002.

Utilizing the vendor-neutral, global community infrastructure of TSANet, the original sponsoring companies have created a community relationship that enables rapid and predictable support for mutual customers among the companies involved. Utilizing standardized relationship elements, members of the TSANet community are required to collaborate at enterprise-level response times on a twenty-four by seven basis. Many members are expected to implement the relationship on a global basis.

"The TSANet membership continues to embrace the community model to meet enterprise customer needs," said Dennis Smeltzer, executive director of TSANet. "This is just another example of how members can utilize a vendor-neutral infrastructure to rapidly deploy the needed support between companies in multivendor environments. Many support organizations are burdened with the task of creating separate support agreements with each company. Under TSANet, companies can join a group relationship and meet the response requirements required by customers."

About TSANet

Founded in 1993, TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network) is a worldwide, multivendor alliance that offers an industry-wide forum to facilitate servicing multivendor customers while providing an infrastructure for more efficient multivendor problem solving. Membership consists of more than one hundred software and hardware companies, including industry giants such as EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, and Veritas. TSANet can be reached at 913-345-9311 or at www.tsanet.org.

Contact: TSANet, Deborah Barnes, 913-345-9311, e-mail deborah@tsanet.org.