Mercury Interactive Joins Unisys-led ASP2000; New Service Launched to Help ASPs Bring e-Business...

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 6, 2001

New Executive Member Brings Proven Application Performance Management

Skills to Group

Mercury Interactive Corp. (Nasdaq:MERQ), the leading provider of enterprise testing and performance

ASP2000 customers can now benefit from Mercury Interactive's key skills, as demonstrated in the new Application Performance Scalability Assessment (APSA) service, co-developed with Unisys.

The Unisys-led ASP 2000 group will use APSA to enable applications service providers (ASPs) to get an early "go/no go" opinion on whether their large, business-critical applications are ready for full-scale development. This important enhancement of the ASP2000 skill set gives ASPs the opportunity to build, test and tune applications to take advantage of the powerful combination of technologies offered by the group.

Yves Ducros, Microsoft Alliance & ASP2000 Director EMEA at Unisys, says: "Going live at pre-production time can be risky for ASPs. Taking applications to a larger scale gives rise to concerns over how quickly they will be able to add another few thousand users and meet their service level agreements - and provide a return on investment. The arrival of Mercury Interactive in the ASP2000 group means service providers will get a better view of how their applications are likely to perform, and the new APSA service is a fast way to get an early indication of results."

Elie Kanaan, Mercury Interactive's European Marketing Director, added, "Mercury Interactive's products are essential solutions for ASPs that want to ensure both performance and scalability. The APSA service is an excellent way for ASPs to benchmark their service and identify potential performance issues that could mean they would not meet their Service Level Agreements."

APSA allows ASPs to verify the behaviour of a set of hosted applications in a Wintel mainframe data centre environment. Thus they will actually benefit from the unique scalability offered by the Unisys e-@ction ES7000 servers with up to 32 processors. The participating ASP only pays for the manpower, provided by consultants trained on Mercury Interactive's products.

Thanks to the Centre sponsors, and in particular Mercury Interactive, the use of state-of-the-art hardware, software, high-speed network, benchmarking tools and methodology, allowing testing of a limited number of scenarios during a ten days period, is free. APSA is limited to one performance assessment per ASP company and is available for those ASPs wanting to assess their released applications in the pre-production phase.

The ASP2000 initiative was introduced in response to the need for ASPs to meet their service level requirements quickly and efficiently with best practices and a technology infrastructure that ensures data security, availability, reliability and scalability with minimum cost of ownership. The result is responsive, economical service to their customers.

As part of the initiative, in December 2000 the group opened the ASP2000 Centre of Excellence (COE) in Paris. The Centre is equipped to reproduce locally a typical ASP data centre architecture, with Unisys e-@action Enterprise Server ES7000 systems, Microsoft software, Cisco networks, EMC storage and StorageTek libraries on a single Storage Area Network.

Located at the Unisys Technology Centre in Paris, the COE is the start of a long-term collaboration among the five companies.

About Mercury Interactive

Mercury Interactive is the leading provider of enterprise testing and performance management solutions. The company's automated software and managed services help companies deliver and maintain high-performance applications. Customers worldwide use Mercury Interactive solutions across their application and technology infrastructures to minimize hardware and operational expenses, protect revenue streams and enhance their competitive positions.

Mercury Interactive was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company has over 1400 employees with offices in more than 20 countries. Further information is available at www.mercuryinteractive.com .

About Unisys

Unisys is an e-business solutions company whose 37,000 employees help customers in 100 countries apply information technology to seize opportunities and overcome challenges of the Internet economy. Unisys people integrate and deliver the solutions, services, platforms and network infrastructure required by business and government to transform their organizations for success in this new era.

The company offers a rich portfolio of Unisys e-@ction Solutions for e-business based on its expertise in vertical industry solutions, network services, outsourcing, systems integration and multivendor support, coupled with enterprise-class server and related technologies. The primary vertical markets Unisys serves worldwide include financial services, transportation, communications, publishing and commercial sectors, as well as the public sector, including federal government customers.

Unisys is headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, in the Greater Philadelphia area. For more information on the company, access the Unisys home page on the World Wide Web at www.unisys.com. Investor information can be found at www.unisys.com/investor.

RELEASE NO.: 0601/8021 http://www.unisys.com/news/releases/2001/jun/06068021.asp

Unisys is a registered trademark and e-@ction is a trademark of Unisys Corporation. All other brands and products referenced herein are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.