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BMC Software Helps Southern Company Maximize Its IT Application Performance InTune(TM) Solution Enables Southern Company to Meet Demanding Service Level Agreement HOUSTON, March 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BMC Software, Inc. , a leading provider of enterprise management solutions, today announced that Southern Company , a leading U.S. producer of electricity and the premier super-regional energy company in the Southeast United States, has standardized on BMC Software's InTune(TM) and MAINVIEW(R) for OS/390 solutions for tuning and monitoring the company's mainframe environment. Southern Company selected these tools after they identified and solved a one-time revenue problem for the electricity company. InTune has helped Southern Company achieve a greater return on their application investment and lowered their total cost of ownership. Southern Company turned to BMC Software when a routine installation of an upgrade to the company's Oracle gateway application resulted in a slow response timeand it was faced with the possibility of having to shut down its OS/390 operating system. The Oracle gateway supported the Account Validation application, an application said by Southern Company to be a "small piece" of their IT environment but actually critical to the entire business of Southern Company. If the Account Validation application didn't operate properly it could impact Southern Company's customer billing production, which generates a large daily revenue stream. When more than 200 man-hours failed to solve the problem, Southern Company turned to BMC Software for a tool that could identify and correct a problem that could reside almost anywhere in the IT environment. Using automated tuning, BMC Software's InTune quickly identified the resource causing the delay -- a missing Oracle module. Once the problem was located, BMC Software's MAINVIEW solutions were used to verify that this missing module was definitely the cause of the slowdown. In such a complex environment, this problemcould not have been detected any other way. BMC Software's solutions returned the operating system to peak performance and enabled Southern Company to meet a demanding financial service level agreement (SLA). Southern Company will continue to use BMCSoftware's unique combination of tuning and monitoring solutions to help quickly identify future performance problems and take corrective action, thereby assuring their business services are available when needed. According to Joe Allen, Southern Company's principal analyst in network and systems engineering, "Without these products, we would not have known what was impacting our application. By not looking into our application performance, we ran the risk of creating issues that could cause expense, lack of service, or both. And yet these solutions were easy to use and could be instigated with almost no effort on our part." InTune is a key component of BMC Software's Application Quality Management (AQM) process, which proactively manages mainframe application tuning by automatically targeting and measuring performance opportunities. The AQM process maximizes performance throughout the application lifecycle to ensure that applications are performing optimally to meet business needs while reducing CPU utilization, deferring processor upgrades and improving customer satisfaction. (See today's related release, "BMC Software Expands Application Quality Management Lifecycle Offering with Industry-First SAP Support.") "BMC Software solutions allow companies to take the right action at the right time to prevent unnecessary downtime or slowdowns in the system -- maximizing the value of IT to the business," said Jonathan Adams, BMC Software's director of Research and Development for MAINVIEW. "Southern Company's use of BMC's InTune and MAINVIEW solutions to identify and eradicate potentially crippling problems in its OS/390 system is just one of the many examples of how our products are managing and maintaining critical business services andhelping to reduce total cost of ownership. BMC helps companies focus on managing what matters from a business perspective -- empowering IT departments to deliver strategic business value." About Southern Company With more than 4 million customers and nearly 39,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier super- regional energy company in the Southeast and a leading U.S. producer of electricity. Southern Company owns electric utilities in four states, a growing competitive generation company, an energy services business and a competitive retail natural gas business, as well as fiber optics and wireless communications. Southern Company brands are known for excellent customer service, high reliability and retail electric prices that are 15 percent below the national average. Southern Company has been named three consecutive years No. 1 on Fortune magazine's "America's Most Admired Companies" list in the Electric and Gas Utility industry. Southern Companyhas been ranked the nation's top energy utility in the American Customer Satisfaction Index four years in a row, and in the latest survey tied for the highest score among all service industry companies. Southern Company has more than 500,000 shareholders, making its common stock one of the most widely held in the United States. Visit the Southern Company Web site at http://www.southerncompany.com/ . About BMC Software BMC Software, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage IT from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2003 revenues of more than $1.3 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit http://www.bmc.com/ . BMC Software, the BMC Software logos and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks belong to their respective companies. http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20011003/BMCLOGO http://photoarchive.ap.org/ DATASOURCE: BMC Software, Inc. CONTACT: Linda McDowell of BMCSoftware, Inc., +1-713-918-3518, or ; or Julie Redard of Porter Novelli, +1-617-897-8200, ext. 234, or , for BMC Software, Inc. Web site: http://www.bmc.com/ http://www.southerncompany.com/

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