i365®, A Seagate Company, Endorses Next Generation of Microsoft Products as Platinum Sponsor of Microsoft Efficiency Launch

i365, Inc., A Seagate Company (NASDAQ:STX) and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, today announced that it is a Platinum Sponsor of the Microsoft Efficiency Launch. As a platinum sponsor, i365 is partnering with Microsoft to support the introduction of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and communicate the benefits of these new products to its customers. i365’s data protection and disaster recovery solutions are optimized for the Microsoft platform and i365 is working closely with Microsoft Corp. to deliver improved performance and enhance a user’s ability to navigate, search, visualize and interact with data.

"Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 are significant releases and represent an inflection point for another level of productivity for our on-premise and cloud-based EVault data protection, analytics, and storage customers,” said Terry Cunningham, general manager of i365. "Our products capitalize on the new features and functionality in these Microsoft offerings to make it even easier to interact with our solutions and improve performance.”

With the explosive growth of business critical data, it has become essential to find new and improved ways to manage, review and interact with data to improve knowledge worker efficiency. As a software developer, this new line of Microsoft products provides i365 with new capabilities for improving the user experience. Features such as touch, gesture and voice recognition capabilities enable i365 customers to more quickly and easily process information and manage applications.

Improving network performance utilization is also of key importance to both i365 and Microsoft customers as data links are of finite bandwidth and represent significant ongoing costs. Improvements in bandwidth management through technologies such as i365’s DeltaPro™ and Microsoft’s BranchCache enable upgraded application designs to improve overall performance and actually save customers money by reducing the associated demand on their IT infrastructures. DeltaPro technology, for example, utilizes block level data deduplication to back up only the changed blocks in the data, not entire files, meaning that less data is moved across the network. This is critical for branch or remote offices that want to centralize backups as well as for cloud-based data protection solutions. Similarly, the BranchCache technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 improves WAN-based application performance. With BranchCache technology, when a file is requested in a branch or remote office location, local servers communicate to determine if the file is already present or a server in the office is designated as a caching machine, so that a locally pre-existing file never has to travel between offices eliminating unnecessary network traffic and improving performance.

"Today’s businesses require fast, around-the-clock access to business information,” said Eric Jewett, director, Windows Server and Tools Services Division, Microsoft Corp. "Our relationship with i365 provides our joint customers with a streamlined computing experience, giving them the powerful abilities to view, manipulate and analyze their data in a user-friendly way.”

About i365

i365, A Seagate Company, provides proven solutions for the protection, retention and management of electronic information. Trusted by over 22,000 customers, our innovative software-, appliance- and cloud-based EVault technologies form solutions to solve organizations’ most rigorous compliance and data management problems. Our solutions address the complexity of explosive data growth, the challenge of maintaining high availability of critical business systems, and the increasing demands of regulatory compliance. www.i365.com.

Copyright © 2009 i365 Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. i365, EVault and MetaLINCS are either trademarks or registered trademarks of i365 Inc. or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.