Storage Pipeline: Review: Out of the Abyss: Page 6 of 8

Compared to those solutions and prices, Fujitsu Softek looked like the
"little engine that could." Its solution was the fastest to deploy (on paper at
least), at two to five days--priced at $2,500 per day with implementation
support services. And it was the lowest priced from a licensing perspective, at
$104,900 plus annual maintenance of 18 percent. We believe Fujitsu Softek's
claim that the customer would start to realize value as soon as the solution was
up and running. Computer Associates narrowly edged out Fujitsu Softek's solution
for several reasons, including Softek's lack of quantification of the cost or
time required to build "action sets," or policies, for managing the Minuteman
infrastructure, which we viewed as the heart of any real solution.

Fujitsu Softek offered a technological quick fix to Minuteman's management
boggle and at a comparatively low cost. Although it's still a young company with
a young product that lacks seamless component integration, we believe that CTO
Nick Tabellion can steer the products to fruition over time, as he did SMS
(Systems Managed Storage) at IBM. SMS is the granddaddy of open-systems SRM.

What nagged at us, however, was the lack of pedigree in the Fujitsu Softek
product. Though the proposal suggested that action sets could be developed to
automate provisioning functions in the solution, the document simply did not
convey the level of experience offered in the much lengthier and more heavily
diagrammed Computer Associates proposal. We were also concerned that Fujitsu
Softek's proposal emphasized the full faith and credit of Fujitsu Ltd. as a
guarantee of the company's future and ability to execute on its product road
map. Yet Softek is working to separate itself from its parent company. Softek
would have been better advised to stick with its strengths--Tabellion and his
team--to make the case for its technical solvency than to lean on the Fujitsu
connection.

So we concluded that Computer Associates BrightStor was the best fit. Our
decision came down to three factors:

1. Computer Associates offered a conservative and carefully reasoned solution
to the needs of Minuteman, a financial firm subject to a broad range of explicit
and demanding government regulations with respect to consumer data. The proposal
suggested that disciplined policies were more important than gee-whiz
technology, and we agree.

2. The BrightStor proposal emphasized the need to understand business
processes and to map data access, protection and retention characteristics to
platforms via policies before making decisions about new hardware, deployment
topologies or appropriate application of technologies like virtualization. So
much emphasis was placed on situation-assessment tasks that must be undertaken
before deployment of the BrightStor software components that the proposal
appeared more like a consulting engagement than a product sales pitch. Usually,
this would be a negative, but in the case of storage management, a heavy
emphasis on situation assessment, gap analysis and pre-implementation design is
required if the solution is to deliver value.