AmberPoint Strengthens Relationship with Microsoft via New Visual Studio Industry Partner Program

Premium Partner Status Brings New Benefits to Web Services Management Leader

Oakland, California, July 29, 2003 -- AmberPoint, Inc., announced today that it has joined the new Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program as a Premier partner. As a VSIP Premier partner, AmberPoint is provided access to Microsoft’s highest level of technical, sales and marketing support to help extend the company’s industry-leading market share for Web services management software. Today’s announcement supports Microsoft’s unveiling of its revised VSIP program, which brings new licensing and co-marketing benefits to companies working with Microsoft.

AmberPoint’s .NET-Connected solutions deliver rich management capabilities to Web services-based applications built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, ensuring operational health and maximizing the business value that organizations gain from their service-oriented architectures. These versions of AmberPoint offer enhancements made possible by fully utilizing the Web services system libraries of the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR).

“The integration of AmberPoint management capabilities with Visual Studio .NET 2003 will provide our mutual customers with a better experience managing business-critical, Web services-based systems," said Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager for the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft Corp. “Its membership in the VSIP program will enable AmberPoint to deliver greater benefits and productivity increases to our mutual customers.”

“Our close relationship with Microsoft has brought us significant benefits over the last year,” said Gary Rinedollar, AmberPoint’s vice president of business development. “The new VSIP Program will bring greater access to Microsoft’s leading technologies, additional support and new opportunities to bring our products for Microsoft .NET technologies to market. As a result of our participation in the VSIP Program, we are better able to provide our customers with management solutions that are optimized to fully leverage the .NET Framework.”

Last March, AmberPoint announced its integration with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Microsoft’s enterprise monitoring, management and security solution. The combination of AmberPoint and MOM provides comprehensive management capabilities across the extended enterprise, including Web services built on any platform and running on either side of corporate firewalls. In February of this year, AmberPoint and Microsoft jointly announced an agreement to build and deliver a combination of tools and management technology intended to help customers manage distributed applications based on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Press Contacts:

Bob Dever
AmberPoint, Inc.
510.433.6553
bdever@amberpoint.com

Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.553.4305
kim@atomicpr.com