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University of Illinois Taps Mirapoint for Messaging System
Mirapoint Wins Competition to Provide E-mail System To Illinois' Largest University

SUNNYVALE, Calif., August 20, 2002 - The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has chosen Mirapoint's M4000 as its campus-wide e-mail messaging solution. As the messaging system for a growing number of colleges and universities around the world, the M4000 Message Server will be deployed this fall for more than 8,000 incoming students at the university. A phased-in deployment will migrate the remainder of the 65,000 existing e-mail accounts to the Mirapoint Message Server over the next 12-18 months.

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has experienced tremendous demand for highly reliable and feature-rich messaging, " said Randy Cetin, director of systems and technology services at Illinois. "We evaluated numerous enterprise-scale solutions and even considered the cost benefits of upgrading our existing home-grown email system. We chose Mirapoint."

The legacy e-mail solution available at Illinois is based on custom configurations of Sendmail running on a collection of SUN and IBM AIX Unix servers. According to Cetin, although the cost of hardware had significantly decreased, the highly customized and complex server infrastructure has become expensive to support, difficult to upgrade, and even more difficult to add new functionality. Economics aside, it had become obvious that they needed to explore an entirely new approach to providing campus e-mail.

Illinois developed an extensive list of prioritized evaluation requirements followed by exhaustive testing and benchmarking. Some of the evaluation criteria included, ease of administration, time to deployment, reliability, scalability, webmail interface, end-user account management, overall performance and usability as well as lowest total cost of ownership.

As e-mail, wireless messaging and webmail have become indispensable tools for students and faculty, messaging continues to be a growing priority for colleges and universities around the world. The Radicati Group, an industry research firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., reports that total global spending by educational institutions on messaging equipment alone reached $230 million in 2001, with $96 million of this accounted for by North American institutions. The firm counted some 29 million worldwide education e-mail users globally in at year-end 2001, with 14 million of those in North America.

"E-mail is increasingly becoming the preferred method of communication on college campuses. Students rely on e-mail to receive assignments, correspond with faculty and staff, and to communicate with friends and family," said Satish Ramachandran, chairman and chief executive officer of Mirapoint. "Mirapoint understands that with limited funds and scarce IT resources, universities need solutions that provide high performance, reliability and cost effectiveness. Mirapoint's messaging products are ideally suited to meet the needs of colleges and universities."

Mirapoint worked closely with The Newman Group, a channel partner in North America, to deliver the Mirapoint solution to the University of Illinois. Newman is a networking and communications integrator that specializes in serving the higher education market sector.

"The education market is challenged with providing corporate level functionality to administrators, faculty and staff, students, and increasingly alumni, often within a limited budget," said Al Newman, president of the Newman Group. "We understand the dilemma, and are already having success in this sector with the compelling, breakthrough solution from Mirapoint. Illinois is another in a long line of colleges and universities that are using the Mirapoint messaging system to provide advanced, highly scalable messaging services."

About Mirapoint
Founded in 1997, Mirapoint designs and manufactures specialized, dedicated Internet messaging solutions optimized for fast deployment in service provider, enterprise, education and government 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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