NetKit Solutions Wins Multi-Year Contract With Camelot, Operator of the UK National Lottery; Company's Latest SmartNet ACP Products Will Support Nationwide Lottery Network

Business Wire, Oct 15, 2002

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

CALABASAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 15, 2002

NetKit Solutions LLC today announced that its wholly owned European subsidiary, NetKit Solutions UK Ltd, has been selected by Camelot Group PLC to provide computer internetworking equipment and support for the UK National Lottery. Camelot, operator of the lottery, will use NetKit's products and expertise to help it meet the high network reliability and performance standards demanded by the UK government and the National Lottery Commission. The agreement is for six years.

NetKit's solution for Camelot is based on its Access Communication Processor ACP 50 and ACP 550 product platforms. The ACPs, located at Camelot processing centers, will perform concentration, routing and protocol mediation between the Lottery access network and Camelot's Host computers, allowing Camelot to leverage evolving access network technologies as it becomes attractive to do so.

By offloading network processing and switching to the ACP platforms, Camelot gains better control and visibility over traffic distribution and monitoring. The ACP solution allows Camelot to achieve full resiliency in the event of any outages in network equipment, Host computers or communication links. The ACP Transaction Protocol enables Camelot to handle surges in lottery transactions and traffic rerouting scenarios, while maintaining their performance goals and up-time commitments in support of more than 25,000 lottery terminals deployed throughout the United Kingdom.

Tim Newing, Camelot Director of Information Technology, said: "Camelot selected the ACP product for its comprehensive suite of communication protocols, its excellent transaction processing performance and the scope of its built-in management and troubleshooting tools. The ACP provides Camelot with a flexible communication platform able to sustain Camelot's ongoing efforts in upgrading their technology to support the needs of The National Lottery for the benefit of players, retailers and the Good Causes. NetKit Solutions has proven to be a valuable partner working with us and our other partners to provide a full product solution tailored to meet the unique technology requirements of our Lottery network infrastructure, thereby allowing us to run our business more efficiently."

Sam Stavro, NetKit Solutions President, said: "We are very pleased to help Camelot evolve the UK Lottery network to an open and more flexible architecture, while meeting their high reliability and transaction processing standards. We are particularly proud of our contributions to the lottery network infrastructure to allow Camelot to achieve their deployment goals in a timely fashion. For our team to be selected as a network equipment supplier to Camelot for the second Lottery license is an unequivocal testament to the proven quality of our products and support capability and a strong indicator of our ability to provide equipment solutions to major mission-critical networks."

About NetKit Solutions

NetKit Solutions LLC specializes in supplying connectivity products and solutions for Operational Support Systems, SCADA, Lottery and Point-of-Sale transaction-based networks. Over 65,000 NetKit ACP nodes have been deployed worldwide by telecommunication service providers and enterprises to interconnect remote locations and Central Offices to improve resiliency and to resolve challenging protocol mediation problems. NetKit news and information are available at www.netkitsolutions.com.

SmartNet and Nevada are registered trademarks of NetKit Solutions LLC.

About Camelot

For further information, please contact: The Camelot Press Office, Tel: 01923 425456, http://www.camelotgroup.co.uk.