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MIRAPOINT MAKES THE GRADE AT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
Mirapoint Lowers Operating Costs and Delivers Advanced Messaging Applications

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 14, 2002 - Mirapoint, the messaging solution of choice for a growing number of colleges and universities around the world, has announced that the University of California at Riverside, Baker College in Michigan, Virginia Tech, and the University of Wisconsin have recently adopted Mirapoint's products to improve performance, simplify operations, and broaden the reach of their university-wide email systems. Mirapoint 's architected messaging solution allows educational institutions to offer advanced messaging services such as student collaboration tools, distance learning and integration with a variety of communications devices to a broad community of users.

Colleges and universities face unique challenges when it comes to offering reliable and high-performing messaging capabilities. Their diverse user community, consisting of students, staff and alumni is constantly changing, growing, and opening itself up to new concerns-particularly in the areas of security. Previous ad hoc attempts to deal with these changes have not been able to keep up. Furthermore, educational institutions have been required to increasingly add new functionality to their messaging infrastructure to address new and emerging demands for Web and wireless-based access to messages as well as provide anti-virus and anti-spam solutions.

"Colleges and universities have outgrown their piecemeal messaging solutions and have begun to look at full-featured, easy-to-maintain systems to handle their burgeoning messaging requirements," said Satish Ramachandran, chairman and chief executive officer of Mirapoint. "With limited funds and scarce IT resources to handle heavy demands, educational institutions need a combination of high performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness to deliver to their users. Many schools are finding that Mirapoint's messaging products are the perfect fit."

The University of California at Riverside recently purchased Mirapoint's new 4-Series products to serve its users. "Providing state-of-the-art messaging, which includes Web mail and traditional services is a technically challenging undertaking," said Russ Harvey, director of computing infrastructure and security at UC Riverside. "We chose Mirapoint because they offer a messaging system that will meet campus needs, while allowing our staff to focus on other challenges and opportunities facing the university."

The students and staff at Baker College, who previously used Microsoft Exchange, are offered Web access to messages and anti-virus protection via Mirapoint's Message Server. In the future, Baker also plans to provide its users with wireless access to their messages. Mirapoint worked closely with its partner the Newman Group, a systems integrator that specializes in serving the education market, to deliver the Mirapoint solution.

Mirapoint was able to move all of Baker's users onto the Mirapoint system in a single day and the migration took place during the middle of the semester, so users were able to have new messaging capabilities immediately. Typically, colleges and universities wait until the end of a semester to begin this kind of project because there usually is a significant amount of downtime.

"Originally we considered one of Sun's iPlanet messaging solutions, but Mirapoint offered the ease of migration and configuration, which made it the right choice for Baker College," said Roy Teahen, director of Internet applications and systems at Baker. "For our staff and students located at any one of our nine main campuses, online or off-site, Mirapoint has been an extremely reliable method to access email, and administrative and class-related information."

Virginia Tech chose Mirapoint's Message Director to provide secure email access to its students, faculty and staff. Prior to using Mirapoint's technology, the college help desk was receiving 10 to 20 calls per day on virus-related problems - taking anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to resolve. According to Virginia Tech's computer systems senior engineer, William Dougherty. "The university used to receive 50,000 reports on viruses a day. By implementing Mirapoint's solution, that number has decreased by 97 percent."

The University of Wisconsin integrated Mirapoint's Message Director into its messaging infrastructure. Prior to adopting Mirapoint, the university was using a variety of software-based products for its virus scanning. Mirapoint's Message Director was installed in a few hours and performed as required under high load. "Email is a critical application for our students and staff to communicate and share information such as assignments, research and reports," said Klara Jelinkova, network service specialist at The University of Wisconsin. "Mirapoint offers a flexible solution that's compatible with other applications and provides the speed and reliability needed for a large educational institution like Wisconsin."

These four universities join several other educational institutions around the world that have deployed Mirapoint messaging systems including Osaka University, the University of Cergy Pontoise in Paris, the University of Tokyo and Wayne State University in Detroit.

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. Mirapoint 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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