Bell Atlantic Automates Information Gathering and Distribution

BLOOMFIELD, NJ – January 15, 2000– Bell Atlantic, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the US, has implemented UFTP version 2, a file transfer solution from Surround Technologies LCC, a Bell Atlantic software vendor.

Bell Atlantic needed a solution to automate unattended distribution of data across multiple hardware platforms. Larry Kiersh, Network Operations Project Leader for Bell Atlantic explained that they had to extract and send data to and from systems on PCs as well as systems on mainframes, and everything in between. When IBM put TCP/IP on the AS/400, he started to converge on FTP [File Transfer Protocol] as the primary method to move these files across the network. As the data systems grew it became increasingly difficult and costly for him to manage the distribution. He knew he needed to find a way to automate the process.

Kiersh explained the issues to Lee Paul, CEO and Partner of Surround Technologies, LLC. "We've done a lot of work for Bell Atlantic over the last couple of years, and when Larry explained his data issues to me, I understood because we used FTP extensively ourselves," explains Paul. "We knew the issues and downfalls with FTP and had already designed a system to automate the process. Due to Larry's immediate needs, we stepped up our development schedule. In one and a half months we released our first version of the Universal FTP Interface System, UFTP, to Bell Atlantic in June 1999. We have continued to make it better and now we have released version 2.0," exclaims Paul.

Kiersh is thrilled and requests the upgrades be sent as fast as Surround Technologies can get them to him. "This product has saved Larry a ton of time and has made his entire department more efficient" continues Paul.

Kiersh developed the Network Operations Results Database system, NORD that receives and transmits data along the northeastern portion of the United States. NORD contains trouble and service order history data and effectively analyzes and reports on this data. UFTP was the solution that Kiersh needed. It enabled him to set up UFTP scripts to retrieve the data automatically. The NORD system would then process the data, and finally, using more UFTP scripts, distribute data out to other systems. In addition, he was able to easily integrate the script executions into our existing programs. The entire manual process of sending and retrieving the data was fully automated and the number of errors was significantly reduced. "Larry started finding more and more ways to use UFTP to further automate many of the other data transfers that they do as well," says Paul

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