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MIRAPOINT INTRODUCES FIRST SYSTEM FOR SECURING ANY MESSAGING ENVIRONMENT
BMW Group to Use New Product to Increase Message Security, Management and Performance

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - March 26, 2001 – Addressing the increasing need for secure messaging networks, Mirapoint, a leading provider of Internet messaging infrastructure products, today announced the release of the Mirapoint Message Director, the first system optimized for securing any messaging environment. The Message Director is a scalable and easy to deploy messaging solution that can be added to any enterprise or service provider messaging environment. BMW Group is the first customer of the Message Director and will use the new product to increase message security, management and performance.

"Security concerns are growing at an alarming rate," said Satish Ramachandran, chairman and CEO of Mirapoint. "Fast, easy access to digital information potentially leaves the door wide open to security risks such as viruses, Spam, and misuse of corporate confidential data, but companies constantly neglect e-mail in their security plans. With the introduction of the Message Director, we are creating a new product category for enterprises and service providers to bullet proof any messaging system from all dimensions of e-mail borne security threats."

According to the International Computer Security Association, over 80 percent of all computer viruses enter an enterprise or service provider environment via e-mail, causing thousands of dollars in lost data and productivity time.

The Message Director acts as an e-mail firewall and resides in between a company’s internal messaging system and the Internet. It is a dedicated system that has the ability to screen incoming and outgoing mail traffic for harmful viruses and Spam using Trend Micro’s InterScan® VirusWall® and InterScan eManager™ solutions.

Companies can enforce mail and corporate policies with the Message Director through an integrated content filtering mechanism that monitors and filters both inbound and outbound messages. Content filtering detects key words in the message body or header and allows administrators to have messages be re-routed to another mailbox, sent back to the sender or deleted.

"The Message Director will help us secure our business communications from security threats that could result in a large data or money loss," said Rudolf Rauber, manager of communication applications, BMW Group. "We needed a solution that could be installed quickly and was flexible enough to work within our current messaging environment. The Message Director is the ideal solution for protecting our company from harmful viruses and Spam, while greatly increasing our messaging system management and performance."

In addition to several security features to help protect customers from the threat of security breaches, the Message Director has significant management capabilities to help systems administrators track and maintain message traffic.

The Message Director has the industry's first unified logging capability providing centralized management of several Message Directors. System administrators can monitor and log messaging activity from a centralized location for the entire enterprise or service provider network. For example, administrators can closely monitor every message sent or received across the messaging infrastructure. Unified logging also makes it possible for integration with other applications for billing, provisioning or obtaining message traffic reports.

The Message Director allows enterprises to intelligently grow their messaging infrastructure. It is interoperable via Internet standards with any messaging system and can be deployed in a matter of minutes. It can easily be added to an existing messaging environment without disruption in service. In addition, the administrator does not have to reconfigure end users’ desktops so new training is not required.

Customers can place the Message Director in front of an existing messaging system to offload processor-intensive operations such as virus scanning, Spam control, encryption and policy enforcement. By using the Message Director to conduct these operations, the existing messaging system’s reliability is improved and its performance is dramatically increased.

The Message Director's ease of installation also allows service providers to quickly deploy new secure messaging services to their customers, while increasing revenues. Now, service providers will be able to offer new managed services such as antivirus, anti-Spam and policy-based messaging to their corporate customers. These high-margin services can be deployed at the customer premise or at the service provider’s data center.

With the Message Director, Mirapoint is introducing a new approach for securing messaging environments," said Harve Tannenbaum, analyst, Summit Strategies, a market research firm based in Boston, Mass. "By stopping viruses and Spam before they enter the system, and enforcing messaging policies on all incoming and outgoing traffic, the Message Director is a natural choice for enterprises and service providers that need to improve security. The fact that the Message Director takes the load off existing message servers -- which can dramatically increase performance -- makes it an even more powerful solution."

The Message Director is able to process 68,000 messages per hour/over 1.6 million per day. For messaging environments with greater inbound message flow requirements, another Message Director can simply be added to provide greater security, scalability and performance. Other key features include:

• Class of service-- allows a service provider or enterprise to place users into discrete groups for enhanced billing, accounting and management services.
• Mail queue management -- allows an administrator to view and manipulate pending messages within the mail queue.
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-based routing enables the Message Director to intelligently route messages based on information contained within any standards-based LDAP server.

Pricing and Availability
The Message Director will be available next month worldwide through direct and indirect channels. Pricing for the Message Director starts at $26,000 and installation can be completed in less than 20 minutes.

About Mirapoint
Founded in 1997, Mirapoint designs and manufactures specialized, dedicated Internet messaging solutions optimized for fast deployment in service provider and enterprise environments worldwide. Mirapoint's cost-effective and modular solutions provide customers with high performance, high reliability, built-in security and easy integration with legacy messaging infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information on Mirapoint, call 800.937.8118 or visit its Web site at http://www.mirapoint.com.

2007 Mirapoint, Inc.  All rights reserved. All company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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