Sterling Commerce Recognized for Excellence in Financial Services Data Management

COLUMBUS, OH--(Marketwire - March 17, 2009) - Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE: T) company, today announced that the company was awarded the Excellence in Industry Solutions Award for Financial Services by the China Computer World Media Group, based on the Bank of China's implementation of Sterling Managed File Transfer (MFT).

Bank of China has seen dramatic increases in data volumes, and so implemented Sterling MFT as its data transmission solution. It securely assures delivery of the data transmitted from the bank's front-end business systems to the back-end core systems to help answer business questions such as which group of customers is more profitable, which timeslot has the highest volume of transactions, and which services deliver the best profit margins.

The Bank of China implementation demonstrated how Sterling MFT can help companies meet stringent requirements for stability, security, and usability in their data transfer processes, while also ensuring transfers of large amounts of data without affecting regular operations. Sterling MFT enables the bank to transfer voluminous amounts of data within a WAN environment between the main data center in Beijing and the bank's four regional data centers. The average amount of data per day collected from the 12 business systems is about 80 gigabytes and month-end volumes reach 200 gigabytes.

"As our data volumes increased, we could see the value of consolidated data as an asset," shares Liu Peng Zhan, data center engineer, Bank of China. "But, traditional FTP methods would not work for us because they do not allow continuity when breaks in the data transfer occur; hence, it does not work well for cross-platforms data transfers. As we have both IBM and Unix mainframes, the need for transfer stability is much higher."

The Excellence in Industry Solutions Award for Financial Services was awarded in January 2009 by China Computer World Media Group, a Sino-foreign joint venture between IDG (International Data Group, USA) and the Institute of Electronic Science & Technology (under the Ministry of Information Industry, China). The China Computer World Media Group hosts a number of awards. The Excellence in Industry Solutions Award for Financial Services is in its sixth year and is conducted annually, but Sterling Commerce won the newly added Industry Excellence Case Study category.

"With 80 percent of the world's business data exchanged as files, IT managers are faced with supporting dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of different disparate technologies to manage the flow of information," said Geoff Baird, global vice president, Managed File Transfer at Sterling Commerce. "Thousands of companies are using Sterling MFT to eliminate time-consuming manual processes and to securely transfer data inside and outside the enterprise."

Sterling MFT is the market-leading solution for managing file transfers of any size, volume or format that removes the barriers of traditional File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to enable companies to deliver higher levels of service. Companies are able to cost-effectively build a streamlined partner and supplier community that enables rapid and cost-effective implementation and execution of new or modified partner and supplier relationships. Sterling MFT also removes the risk of breaches by removing security exposure for file-based transfers.

About Sterling Commerce

Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc (NYSE: T) company, helps customers thrive in a global economy by connecting their business communities, processes, people and technology. More than 30,000 customers worldwide use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration, multi-channel selling, and supply chain fulfillment, and payments management to optimize business performance inside and outside their enterprise. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Sterling Commerce has offices in 24 countries around the world. More information can be found at www.sterlingcommerce.com.