NEWS

Avamar Wins Morgan Stanley Innovation Award

IRVINE, Calif., July 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Avamar Technologies announced today that it has won Morgan Stanley's 2005 Innovation Award. This award was presented to Avamar Technologies and VMWare as two companies that have proven "game changing" innovation. This was the first year that Morgan Stanley has presented such an award at its 5th annual CTO Summit. The CTO Summit is designed to identify influential companies, as well as recognize impactful technologies that have not only added measurable value and efficiency to the overall technology marketplace, but have also enabled Morgan Stanley to continue to leverage innovative technology in its own environment.

Morgan Stanley recognized Avamar's innovative Axion solution and understood the need for improving its backup and restore technology. They progressed from a complete tape-based solution which was more timely, costly and less network efficient and introduced a disk-based solution from Avamar. Morgan identified that the age old methodology of tape based backup had to evolve. As data environments have grown exponentially over the years the practice of backing the data up once a week and performing incremental backups nightly becomes unrealistic. This old methodology dictates that a client moves 200% the amount of their primary data around their environment every week. The Avamar solution through its patented Commonality Factoring technology reduces the amount of data being moved by over 95+%, while still providing full restores. This allowed Morgan to reduce backup windows from 8-12 hours down to 15 minutes; improve restore performance dramatically; replicate the data to remote locations using existing networks and did all of this with a lower TCO then their existing local tape backup. Implementing a disk-based data protection solution was a proactive approach; one which helped to backup and restore important operational data while enabling Morgan Stanley's IT team to be more effective.

"Avamar is proud to be recognized by Morgan Stanley for the way our software has allowed them to innovatively meet the challenges of protecting their business data assets," said Ed Walsh, CEO of Avamar Technologies. "Clearly Morgan Stanley understands the leverage that technology innovation provides to a company in a competitive global market. Changing the game is what Morgan does to stay ahead. We are proud to be recognized for helping Morgan Stanley in this pursuit. This award is like being called the world's greatest fighter by Muhammad Ali."

The Innovation Awards are presented at Morgan Stanley's CTO Summit, the event through which the winning companies are identified and selected. A formal and rigorous process, selection begins with recommendations from top-tier venture capitalists, and culminates with the evaluation and acceptance of the companies' offerings by Morgan Stanley IT.

"Avamar has a game changing solution. Through their innovative Commonality Factoring technology, we have been able to rethink our backup, recovery and replication infrastructure providing Morgan Stanley better local and remote recovery at a greatly reduced TCO. This innovation is needed in the industry to keep up with the demands of cost effectively protecting the data in the enterprise." said Guy Chiarello, Morgan Stanley's CTO and CIO. "With respect to technology as both a business enabler and as an agent for business growth, our culture inspires an offensive mind-set where innovation is a critical underlying theme. The CTO Summit and, more recently, the Innovation Awards are ways in which IT supports that culture."

About Avamar

Avamar is leading a new wave of innovative solutions that deliver on the promise of disk-based solutions for backup, restore and disaster recovery. Founded in 1999, Avamar is currently shipping Axion, the first true disk-based data protection solution, to both mid-tier and large enterprise customers. Axion provides unique functionality, performance and efficiency made possible by taking maximum advantage of today's affordable disk storage technology. Headquartered in Irvine, California, Avamar has offices throughout the US and is privately held with leading international investors, including Benchmark Capital, CMGI@Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners.