Attachmate's NetWizard Makes Company-Wide Windows 95 Migrations Simple, Fast, and Painless; Attachmate's NetWizard 3.0 gives companies powerful 32-bit enterprise-wide software distribution, license metering, and hardware and software inventory capabilities

Business Wire, March 25, 1996

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 25, 1996--Attachmate - The Intranet Co.(tm) - today announced NetWizard(r) 3.0, the latest version of Attachmate's award-winning enterprise software management system.

Version 3.0 expands NetWizard's capabilities to embrace Windows(r) 95 and Windows NT(tm) client and server platforms. With NetWizard, companies gain full control of workstation software and applications throughout the enterprise. NetWizard's powerful software distribution, application metering, management, and inventory capabilities give companies all the tools necessary to manage and automate the migration of enterprise workstations to Windows 95.

"Organizations around the globe are migrating to Windows 95 and Windows NTW," said Brad Chase, general manager, Personal Systems Division at Microsoft. "We are very pleased that Attachmate's NetWizard product now supports the automated deployment of Windows 95 thereby reducing the time, effort, and cost of this migration."

"We use NetWizard to manage purchased and homegrown application software on 1,200 workstations, nearly half of which are in remote locations or completely mobile, " said Doug Albro at Brown and Williamson. "We realize significant cost savings by using NetWizard to distribute all new or upgraded applications throughout our enterprise. We also plan to use NetWizard to automate our migration from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, from planning through roll-out."

"As companies build corporate Intranets and migrate to Windows 95, they need powerful, far-reaching software distribution and management capabilities," said Paul Rodwick, executive vice president in charge of products at Attachmate(r). "NetWizard 3.0 is the only product that gives companies software distribution, metering, and management across the entire Intranet, including full compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows NT. Through NetWizard, companies can distribute Windows 95, 32-bit applications, TCP/IP or other protocol stacks, or any other application to every workstation on the corporate Intranet - local and remote."

As companies migrate to new platforms and applications, they need powerful tools to help them manage and automate the process. Attachmate has identified five critical steps in a successful Windows 95 migration. These steps are:

1. Establish control of existing hardware and software resources

2. Determine hardware upgrade needs

3. Determine application software needs

4. Replace existing Windows or DOS operating systems with

Windows 95

5. Migrate existing applications and deploy new 32-bit

applications

NetWizard automates all of these tasks. For companies that must migrate hundreds or thousands of workstations, NetWizard 3.0 increases the ease and reliability of the migration while reducing the time and cost involved.

NetWizard 3.0 provides a powerful suite of management capabilities, including full 32-bit application support, Windows 95 and Windows NT support for long file names and Registry management. With NetWizard companies can:

-- inventory hardware and software installed on all desktops throughout the enterprise;

-- automatically distribute software to local and remote DOS, Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, and Macintosh workstations;

-- automatically update remote and grouped workstations through simple drag-and-drop functionality;

-- automatically meter application usage;

-- limit the time allowed in certain applications. For example, limiting Web browsing to one hour per day for certain groups of users;

-- easily monitor and enforce software licenses to ensure enterprise-wide legal compliance;

-- remotely view and edit files (including drag-and-drop edits to the Windows 95 Registry), restart Windows, reboot, or execute programs on end user desktops.

NetWizard's unique peer-to-peer architecture provides the flexibility and power to manage distributed software environments of any size or type. Other advantages of NetWizard 3.0 include concurrent multi-protocol support and compatibility with any ODBC database. NetWizard also offers powerful check-point restart, recovery and back-out capabilities as well as streamlined distribution through branch management support.

Because of its broad support of multiple platforms and environments, NetWizard is included with other Attachmate products such as EXTRA!(r) Personal Client - Attachmate's flagship solution that provides connectivity from virtually any workstation to any host.

"Our customers deploying EXTRA! Personal Client generally canvas hundreds to thousands of workstations across the entire enterprise," said Rodwick. "Based on feedback from these customers and their need to ease the strain of deployments to large workstation communities, we developed NetWizard and include it with our other products such as EXTRA! Personal Client. Through NetWizard, deploying an application to many workstations can literally be as easy as installing it on one."

NetWizard has become one of the fastest-growing software management products on the market. Sales of NetWizard grew by 300% in the past year, and Attachmate now has more than 500,000 NetWizard-capable desktops deployed worldwide. Individual customer implementations of NetWizard range from 40-50 workstations to over 10,000 workstations.