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INVIO ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE OEM AGREEMENT WITH McDATA CORP

Invio Software Inc, providing innovative software to centrally control and automate enterprise data storage operations, announced a licensing agreement with McDATA Corporation, a worldwide leader in open, ultra-high availability storage networking solutions. Under terms of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement signed between the two companies, McDATA will license Invio's Storage Practice Manager software, leveraging its extensive process automation technology to create next-generation enterprise storage management solutions.

The announcement will enable McDATA to introduce solutions that extend their product capabilities and automate the management of enterprise storage operations, allowing customers to better optimize networked storage resources, while increasing operational control and policy compliance. It also confirms Invio's commitment to establishing mutually beneficial partnerships with leaders in the data storage industry.

"Invio and McDATA share a complementary vision to make 'real-time networked storage infrastructure' a reality," said Gary Gysin, McDATA's vice president and general manager of software development. "Our customers are demanding solutions today that simplify getting storage services from their network to their applications. These solutions must be best-of-breed and must work within the context of our customers' existing infrastructure and management practices. The McDATA - Invio partnership meets those requirements. We examined a number of competing technologies and selected Storage Practice Manager because of its superior ability to automate complicated processes and its abundance of flexibility. Integrating these capabilities into our portfolio of storage management software will both complement and extend the value for McDATA customers by providing process automation solutions across the complete range of enterprise storage operations."

"McDATA has consistently demonstrated its market leadership in the development of large-scale enterprise storage networking hardware and software. McDATA's selection of Storage Practice Manager further validates that the vision for storage services on demand is viable, and Invio automation delivers clear, immediate benefits to customers today," said Ranga Rangachari, Invio Software's Chief Executive Officer.

About Invio Storage Practice Manager

Storage Practice Manager offers IT departments a flexible, manageable way to evolve to the goal of a self-service storage utility. Storage Practice Manager integrates and automates the system processes, user tasks and workflows across the range of platforms, tools and people involved in delivering infrastructure services to business applications. This provides significant improvements over traditional wizards-based administrator tools to drive increased service delivery, staff productivity and policy compliance. With Storage Practice Manager, IT experts can encapsulate operational practices into automated processes that can be used, and reused by others in a self-service model. This "center of competency approach" enables IT departments to leverage scarce skills to scale operations across the enterprise in a consistent, auditable fashion. Storage Practice Manager allows you to map the right level of automation and control to your organizational and management models -- giving you the flexibility to work the way you want to work. Designed to extend and integrate (not replace) the capabilities of your management software and infrastructure, Storage Practice Manager protects your investment in existing and future technology.