Minnesota Courts Give Thumbs Up to NetScaler for Enabling Judicious Use of Bandwidth and Fast, Secure Application Delivery

Market Wire, September, 2004

NetScaler, Inc., a pioneer in application delivery systems, today announced that the State of Minnesota has deployed the NetScaler 9000 Series application delivery systems as part of a new judicial information system rolling out across the state. By leveraging NetScaler's products, the Minnesota Courts Information System (MNCIS) gives all 87 county courthouses browser-based secure access to comprehensive criminal and civil court information over an existing network that is shared with other state agencies.

"As a state agency, we have to be very careful about how we spend the public's money," says Bob Hanson, Minnesota's Courts' chief information officer. "Without NetScaler's application delivery systems, we wouldn't have been able to run the MNCIS system without upgrading our shared network, which would have cost millions of dollars for the state."

After conducting a thorough review of potential solutions, the MNCIS team selected the NetScaler 9000 systems because they reduced bandwidth requirements by 80 percent without requiring individual devices at each of the 87 local sites. Additionally, the team discovered that the NetScaler system had a rich set of application intelligent capabilities that would avoid additional hardware and software costs down the road, including encryption, load balancing, TCP offloading and SSL acceleration, as well as management features such as consolidated web logging and database health checks.

The State of Minnesota's drive for its new information system began after high-profile trials in the late 1990s spotlighted the need to seamlessly interconnect the state's 87 courthouses. Although initially conceived as an information system for the criminal courts, Minnesota went one step further -- making the system securely available to all courts, including juvenile, civil, family, small claims, mental health, probate and traffic courts.

"With the help of NetScaler technology, the new MNCIS system will improve our ability to better protect the people of Minnesota and their interests in the judicial system," continues CIO Hanson. "Plus, we anticipate that the single, secure view into all court related information across the state will create efficiencies by making court documents, schedules, and dispositions available to judges and their clerks, county attorney's offices, and law enforcement and correctional agencies."

About MNCIS

MNCIS is a browser-based information system based on an off-the-shelf software application. The application is centrally hosted in St. Paul, Minn. on a combination of Microsoft web and database servers, which are fronted by NetScaler 9800HA Application Delivery Switches. The MNCIS system interconnects the 87 county courthouses across a high-speed and redundant network run by the state's Intertech agency in the Department of Administration. Intertech also provides networking to other state and county agencies.

About NetScaler

NetScaler provides networking systems that enable the fast and secure delivery of applications by integrating a unique suite of optimization, security and switching capabilities. The NetScaler 9000 Series application delivery systems provide improved application performance and hardened security for many of the world's largest enterprises, content providers and e-commerce vendors while greatly reducing total cost of ownership.

NetScaler headquarters are in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit http://www.netscaler.com.

NetScaler is a trademark of NetScaler, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other companies and products mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

Contact: John Oh NetScaler, Inc. (408) 678-1722 joh@netscaler.com