Kazeon to Transform Unstructured Information Management by Delivering Integrated Visibility and Control

Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs Invest $17M to Help Enterprises Reduce Risk and Lower Operational Costs

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Moutain View, CA — March 15, 2005 — Kazeon, a leading provider of unstructured information management solutions for the enterprise, today announced its strategy to deliver a series of products that will provide unified visibility and consistent control for unstructured enterprise information, including shared files, email and other non-transactional data. Kazeon's innovative approach reduces risk, lowers operating costs and drives informed decisions for enterprise customers. Kazeon is backed by $17 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs. The company is led by CEO and cofounder, Sudhakar Muddu, a proven executive and successful entrepreneur who founded Sanera Systems, a next-generation SAN technology company, which was sold to McDATA Corporation in 2003. The Kazeon management team also includes several seasoned executives who come from some of the technology industry's leading companies, including VERITAS Software, Sun Microsystems, Inktomi, Broadcom, Sprint and Cisco. The company's first product is currently being tested with several Fortune 500 companies and is expected to be generally available in mid-2005.

Companies worldwide are seeing exponential growth in their non-transactional business data such as contracts, financial reports, product information and customer communications. In fact, many companies now have as many files in their internal networks as existed on the entire Internet just a few years ago. Meanwhile, strategic business mandates, such as regulatory compliance and corporate governance, are making rapid, controlled access to information a critical requirement for everyone from the data center to the boardroom.

"Until now, enterprises have been limited by a storage-centric infrastructure that has not evolved to effectively support the richness of content that is contained inside the unstructured files on their network. The long term information access and retention needs of corporate executives, compliance officers and legal teams are fueling the need for new ways to provide greater visibility into and control of unstructured information," said Sudhakar Muddu, CEO of Kazeon. "Our new platform leverages search, database and file system technology to provide more consistency around how information is classified, managed and retrieved without disrupting user behavior or forcing migration to a centralized repository."

With integrated information visibility and control services, corporations will have the necessary data management foundation to successfully implement solutions that access, track and manage their unstructured enterprise information on a broad scale. The Kazeon platform enables advanced applications including storage search and classification, information lifecycle management (ILM) and the archival of file system and application data. Kazeon's strategy is aligned to meet the immediate and underserved needs of enterprises around unstructured data. According to Ray Paquet, vice president and research director of Gartner, "Managing unstructured information is becoming a priority. With unstructured files accounting for more than half of corporate data, it will become increasingly important for enterprises to know what content is in their files, be able to archive them appropriately and find the content they need when they need it."

The most significant barrier to effective management of unstructured information is that most companies are unaware of the full scope of available information in their networks. Visibility is obscured by disparate data formats that are user-, application-, or technology-dependent. Attempts to solve these problems through traditional text search or storage resource management applications have lacked the awareness of both content and metadata required for a complete view of enterprise information. Without that insight, there is no effective way to manage information based on business value. Kazeon aims to remove these long-standing limitations with products built around its new unstructured information management platform.

The core of the Kazeon platform is an advanced data classification system that efficiently creates an abstract for each file in the network. These abstracts are stored across Kazeon's distributed repository that scales to provide a uniform view of billions of objects and the information they contain. Built around the repository are integrated services that support critical information management applications such as storage search, reporting, auditing, archival, and policy management. A Kazeon API enables any other application or service to directly contribute data to, and make requests from, the Kazeon platform.

"Government regulations, internal corporate governance policies and budget constraints are pushing companies to provide greater visibility and control over their unstructured files," said Sumant Mandal of Clearstone Venture Partners. "While services exist to manage transactional data stored in databases, more than half of the information generated inside companies is contained in unstructured files. The Kazeon team has developed a solution that streamlines storage operations and reduces a corporation's risk of costly litigation or embarrassing compliance violations."

"Kazeon has put together all the pieces - the vision, the technology and the team -- needed to be successful," said Tom Dyal of Redpoint Ventures. "The market opportunity they've identified is significant and the initial feedback on their product indicates that they've created something unique. Kazeon will not only change how enterprises approach the handling of unstructured files, but will also help them achieve strategic objectives such as risk mitigation, regulatory compliance, and litigation preparedness."

About Kazeon
Founded in 2003, Kazeon develops application-independent unstructured information management services that provide consistent information visibility and control across diverse unstructured data sets, such as user files and email. The company's founders and executive team are experts in search, database, and storage technology. Kazeon is based in Mountain View, CA and privately funded by top-tier venture firms Redpoint Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs.