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Northwestern University Monitors Campus-Wide Wireless Network with Fidelia^® NetVigil™

NetVigil implementation monitors over 150 WiFi student and faculty access points

Princeton, NJ – June 30, 2003 – Fidelia^® Technology, the leader in Instant Business Visibility™ software, today announced that Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) is the first organization to use Fidelia NetVigil™ to monitor its campus-wide WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) network. Northwestern is using NetVigil to monitor over 150 wireless access points that provide connectivity for users in university common areas. NetVigil provides integrated fault and performance monitoring of applications, networks, servers/systems and user-defined data sources.

"Wireless access is becoming an important component of many organizations' networking and business strategies," said David Woodall, president and CEO of Fidelia. "The result is that wireless switches are becoming a growing part of their core infrastructures. IT managers need tools, such as NetVigil, that allow them to monitor these devices as part of an integrated fault and performance monitoring approach. We're pleased that Fidelia is able to add value to Northwestern University's initial NetVigil investment by monitoring their WiFi equipment."

NetVigil monitors standard performance metrics for wireless access points, such as bandwidth utilization, traffic rate, errors, and collisions on network ports. Also, NetVigil can monitor wireless-specific metrics, such as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) enabling, errors related to invalid WEP keys and SSIDs (service set identifiers), transmission power levels, and wireless antenna status. Monitoring can be extended easily to include signal strength, signal-to-noise ratio, number of associated nodes, authentication failure rate, and others.

Northwestern University is using NetVigil to monitor performance and utilization of its distributed wireless access points. In addition to providing event notification, NetVigil assists the IT department with capacity planning for its wireless infrastructure. The university initially installed NetVigil to monitor switching (layer 2) and routing (layer 3) functions on its 25 Cisco 6509 switches and to collect information on approximately 2,000 network servers and other devices that comprise its campus infrastructure.

"The wireless network augments our existing wired infrastructure. It's installed in locations that aren't conducive to wired ports," said Chris Fabri, network engineer at Northwestern University. "Using NetVigil allows us to easily monitor under and over utilization so we can make sure we place WiFi equipment where it's needed most, for example, at the Kellogg School of Management where students work collaboratively on a lot of projects."

Fidelia recently announced NetVigil v3.5 with innovations that include the ability to build nested containers and the flexibility to quickly drill down through the service hierarchy to view the real-time status of the underlying infrastructure. Wireless managers can employ this functionality to group wireless tests in a manner relevant to their view of the service delivery, allowing them to easily determine when wireless services are affected and where problems occur.

"One of the things that appealed to us was NetVigil's ability to group devices into containers so that individual departments can have visibility into how their portion of the network is performing," said Dave Carr, director, IT-Telecommunications and Network Services, Northwestern University. "NetVigil's ability to scale and its flexibility have allowed us to extend our existing NetVigil implementation to monitor our wireless access points. This reduces our total cost of ownership and makes management of the overall network easier."

META Group research indicates that wireless and mobile transactions account for nearly 20% of business-to-business transaction volume and 25% of business-to-consumer traffic. According to the research firm, 75% of Global 2000 firms will test wireless LANs by the end of this year and 90% will go into production deployment by 2005/06. "As mobile and remote computing becomes more prevalent through 2004, IT organizations will have to find ways to manage and support new wireless infrastructures while minimizing the costs of doing so," said Michele Hudnall, senior research analyst, META Group, Inc.

NetVigil is affordably priced for mid-tier enterprises, but scalable enough for Fortune 500 organizations. Licenses for NetVigil start at $40,000, with an average price of approximately $80,000. To date, Fidelia has filed for four patents on the NetVigil intellectual property. NetVigil runs under Solaris, Linux and Windows.

About Fidelia® Technology, Inc.

Founded in 2000, Fidelia Technology, Inc. is a privately held, venture-funded software company. Fidelia's flagship NetVigil solution, officially launched in summer 2002, is a breakthrough IT infrastructure monitoring application that provides real-time visibility into the performance of the overall business. Customers benefiting from NetVigil's business containers include Sony Online Entertainment, Spirit Airlines, eBenX and Yale University. At the 2003 New Jersey Technology Council Venture Capital Fair, Fidelia was awarded the top prize as the company most capable of fulfilling extraordinary potential in a promising marketplace.

Fidelia is headquartered at 300 Alexander Park, Suite 205, Princeton, NJ 08543; Tel: 609-452-2225. Fax: 609-452-2662. The NetVigil demo and software download are located at www.fidelia.com. Send information requests to info@fidelia.com.

Fidelia, the Fidelia logo, and Fidelia NetVigil are trademarks of Fidelia Technology. Other trademarks and brands in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

Press resources, including screen shots, customer contacts and analyst contacts, are available on Fidelia's Website at www.fidelia.com/presskit.