ANS announces service level agreements for second generation networking services.

ELMSFORD, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 22, 1996--ANS, an America Online Company, today announced immediate availability of its second generation Enterprise Network Services solutions, some of which include service level agreements, and all are designed to support customer's mission critical applications.

ANS Enterprise Services for business customers include ANS SureRemote(SM) Dial Access Services, ANS Web Hosting Services, ANS Virtual Private Data Networking (VPDN) Services and ANS Intranet Solution Services. The ANS service agreements for ANS Web Hosting and VPDN Services provide commitment levels for initial order fulfillment and ongoing operations to ensure that customers' mission-oriented information needs are continually satisfied.

"Our proven networking experience continues to attract the top businesses in the world to ANS for the highest quality business information delivery services," said Bruce Bond, president and CEO of ANS. "The fact that our Enterprise Service offerings are all managed end-to-end by dedicated ANS people, and include best of breed partners, makes them the best choice for customers who view internetworking as critical to their success," Bond said.

Eric Paulak of the Gartner Group said, "The first Internetworking Provider giving customers service level agreements will have a distinguishing competitive advantage. This is the way the industry is going and, actually, those who don't offer guarantees will be at a definite disadvantage."

"The unsurpassed quality of ANS customer service and support has allowed us to get new customers operational quickly and to continuously provide the highest levels of service in the industry," said Jordan Becker, vice president of Network Services. "We've been providing service level agreements for appropriate services for several months and we have committed to connection availability levels of upwards of 99.5 percent a month."

ANS SureRemote Service is a fully managed solution that offers business customers a reliable, secure, fast and easy way to connect remote and mobile users to corporate and public information resources from any location. "With ANS SureRemote Service customers can cost efficiently offer thousands of users high speed access for as little as two cents per minute during business hours," said Cindy Snedgar, ANS SureRemote Product Marketing manager. As an additional option, ANS can include end user Help Desk Support.

ANS Web Hosting Services provide a high quality, reliable and feature-rich hosting infrastructure that enables enterprises to deliver a Web presence for strategic marketing, commerce, and customer or partner information sharing. The ANS service is targeted to companies with mission oriented World Wide Web needs that require high quality service. ANS Web Hosting service is priced on a usage sensitive basis, starting at $2,500 per month, and includes up to three sites per customer, enabling a company to maintain separate branding for subsidiaries or products. The Web Hosting offering also includes separately priced bundled solutions designed for electronic commerce applications. As part of its basic Web Hosting offering, ANS is providing customers with service level agreements that support 99.5 percent service availability.

Moving customers beyond passive publishing, ANS brings best of breed partners to its Web Hosting solutions. For example, ANS has partnered with OneWave Inc., whose OpenScape software enables organizations to integrate business applications across disparate IT systems and extend and enhance those applications to the Internet World Wide Web environment. OneWave gives customers the ability to more quickly and cost-effectively extend transaction oriented business functions onto the Internet, leverage existing technology investments and minimize implementation time.

Jim Nondorf, vice president of Strategic Partnerships for OneWave, said, "We are pleased to be working with a company of the caliber of ANS which is known for the quality and dependability our customers demand. Our partners are a strategic part of the OneWave solution. As such, they must have an outstanding reputation in the marketplace for reliability, performance and customer service."

ANS VPDN Service is a secure, encrypted LAN-to-LAN data networking solution that provides unparalleled site-to-site managed service. With ANS VPDN, businesses can quickly implement an internetworking solution that meets their service level requirements at a price below what it would cost to do it themselves. The second generation service model includes multi-protocol support. Monthly prices for encrypted T1 VPDN services start at $2,800. Service level agreements for VPDN services support 99.5 percent backbone access availability for any VPDN site.

"We found it more efficient and cost-effective to utilize ANS' advanced expertise and infrastructure to meet our strategic networking goals without having to invest in a whole new network infrastructure based on Internet technologies," said John Severson, vice president of Information Services and Change Agent at The Trane Company, which has a 120-site VPDN from ANS. "Our business imperative was to achieve dramatic reductions in process times, dramatic improvements in customer service and double revenues," he said.

ANS Intranet Solutions Services combine ANS' network infrastructure and management, Remote Access and Web capabilities to customize fully managed, Internet-technology, open communications-based, solutions that offer the highest level of reliability to businesses that view information sharing with internal and external audiences as strategic necessities. For minimum cost with maximum flexibility, ANS clients can implement the Intranet solutions they need to realize opportunities and be leaders in their markets.

ANS announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard and America Online in March to deliver end-to-end Intranet Solutions on HP hardware. "HP, AOL and ANS are uniquely positioned to provide superior Intranet solutions because of the expertise and commitment each company brings to this rapidly emerging market," said John Skibinski, ANS Product Marketing director. "ANS has the best of breed partners to give companies an integrated resource with proven, hands-on experience in developing, implementing and managing the components of an Intranet solution," he said.

ANS Enterprise Solutions are ideally suited for industries such as Financial Services, Manufacturing, Publishing, Health Care and Retail that have a strategic interest in reliable information sharing to communicate with internal and external customers and partners.

ANS offers integrated, multi-media information delivery services utilizing open standards-based technologies to meet the strategic and mission critical needs of businesses. ANS also offers an applications level security and resource management solution called ANS InterLock(SM) Service; a customer-premise based Web Hosting solution called ANS InterServ(SW) Service and Internet Attachment Services at speeds from 56K to T3, through its global backbone network, ANSnet. ANS was acquired by AOL in February 1995.

CONTACT: ANS, Elmsford

Victoria Desidero, 914/789-5339

desidero@ans.net