Peribit Networks and SITA Partner to Reduce Operational Costs and Improve Application Performance for the Air Transport Industry

Business Wire, Nov 18, 2004

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- EUROCONTROL, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, Addresses Critical Application Performance with Peribit Networks and SITA

Peribit Networks, the leader in application delivery over the WAN, and SITA SC, the world's leading provider of integrated communications to the air transport industry, today announced a partnership to improve the performance of critical applications over the WAN and reduce overall network costs. The partnership adds to SITA's existing suite of global communications services -- currently used by 1,800 customers worldwide -- to address the specific need of improving applications performance across global distributed networks.

Peribit Networks' PeriSphere(TM) architecture is widely recognized as dramatically improving application performance by addressing issues around network latency, congestion, contention (QOS) and path optimization. Peribit Networks' technology will be added to SITA's new Traffic Management and Optimization Service to deliver a cost effective solution for air transport businesses grappling with performance across distributed Wide Area Networks.

The combination of SITA's industry leading professional services and Peribit Networks' unique technology will have a direct impact on how networks within the sector can improve business processes and performance, and provide tangible return on IT investment.

"While airlines and airports are looking to deploy new IP-based services and applications, they're faced with tight IT budgets and an increased need for consistent critical application performance in remote sites all over the world," said Brijdeep Sahi, vice president of marketing at SITA SC.

"This new partnership, which will give significant operational and networking related cost savings, is another proof-point of our strategy to develop relationships with market leaders to design solutions that best fit our customers' needs," Sahi added.

EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, is the first customer to work with Peribit Networks and SITA to deploy the joint solution. In the first Phase of the optimization project, EUROCONTROL is working with SITA to deploy Peribit devices across the EUROCONTROL Agency Corporate Backbone interconnecting all the Agency sites to overcome critical network congestion and performance problems. Peribit Networks and SITA were selected due to superior performance improvement results achieved during competitive testing, the depth and breadth of the joint SITA and Peribit Networks Solution and the competitive financial proposal. The combined solution allows EUROCONTROL to address many future application deployment requirements within a single integrated architecture and accelerate their Return on Investment.

According to the Airline IT Trends Survey 2004, conducted by SITA and Airline Business magazine, air carriers are operating in a highly competitive, volatile market under immense pressure to achieve profitability. The survey notes that the industry must increase efficiencies and reduce costs to remain viable. Key IT challenges identified in the report include:

--A move to open systems from proprietary technology

--A need to reduce voice costs through deployment of VoIP networks

--A push to improve customer services

--Network expansion under constrained and limited budgets

"Many of the IT issues faced by airlines, airports and travel distribution companies can be solved with improved application performance," says Shane Buckley, President International at Peribit Networks. "SITA is the cornerstone of IT expertise in the air transport industry and we see a fantastic opportunity in the new partnership. Peribit is the only company that can deliver a single integrated framework that resolves WAN application performance and do it in a way that produces an ROI in months."

PeriSphere

The Peribit PeriSphere(TM) architecture allows companies to increase network performance without costly investment in additional bandwidth, one of the biggest factors in IT spending today. The PeriSphere(TM) architecture integrates compression, sequence caching, latency reduction, bandwidth management, path optimization, and visibility tools and is available in the full range Peribit Networks hardware and software solutions. Together with the market-leading products already available from Peribit Networks, the new systems provide the industry's most comprehensive offering for WAN optimization.

About Peribit Networks

Peribit Networks improves customer business efficiencies by resolving the technical limitations of WANs, increasing available bandwidth, and accelerating applications. The Peribit PeriSphere architecture is the industry's only integrated WAN optimization architecture that enables application rollout and webification, data center consolidation, and improves disaster recovery/backup and regulatory compliance for enterprise IT organizations. The Peribit Sequence Reducer and Sequence Mirror platforms combined with the SRS Software System and PeriScope CMS Central Management System software provide significant, measurable return on investment within months of deployment. Recently named Silicon Valley's second fastest growing private company for the period of 2001 to 2003, Peribit Networks is funded by top-tier investors Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, and Mayfield. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Peribit has operations throughout North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.peribit.com.