Fast Growing Telecommunications Provider Chooses EMC Open Storage Technology to Improve Customer Service and Cash Flow

Hopkinton, - August 20, 1996 -

EMC Corporation today announced that National Telephone & Communications, Inc. (NTC), one of the nation's fastest-growing telecommunications services resellers, has selected EMC's Symmetrix 3500 intelligent open storage systems to dramatically improve customer billing efficiency.

"With NTC's revenues doubling every year on average in recent years, it was becoming increasingly clear that we needed a better way to manage the rapidly growing volumes of information our business was generating," said Bill Savage, NTC's Vice President of Operations. "EMC's significant system performance improvements will assist us as we move to customer billing 28 days each month, rather than the five days we are limited to now. As a result, EMC will directly help us improve cash flow, increase efficiency, and more evenly spread out bill processing loads across the month."

"One of the reasons we can compete with the larger long-distance services companies is that NTC strives to deliver a `Ritz Carlton' level of customer service," Savage explained. "EMC will further enhance this strategic advantage by providing our customer service representatives with faster access to more accurate, comprehensive billing information. EMC's reputation for superior reliability also comes into play, since it ensures this information will be available 24 hours a day."

Savage estimates that, in a single hour of system downtime, NTC would miss 500 calls into customer service and experience delays in capturing hundreds of real-time customer call records. The impact would be delayed billing and cash flow and, ultimately, disenchanted customers who might switch to competing services.

"With the Symmetrix open architecture, we can consolidate storage for the ever-growing number of servers and operating systems in our environment," noted Hank Camacho, NTC's Manager of Management Information Systems. "This approach will preserve our increasingly valuable investment in information storage and give us the flexibility to easily add new and faster servers. In fact, we hope to never have to buy server-based disk storage again."

NTC, based in Irvine, Calif., will use EMC's Symmetrix 3500 Integrated Cached Disk Arrays (ICDA) to provide intelligent storage to Compaq and Sun servers running an Oracle-based data warehouse. EMC's open storage systems will provide rapid access to -- and secure storage for -- billing, call records, general ledger, and sale commissions for NTC's 200,000 customers and 50,000 sales agents across the U.S. The Symmetrix is replacing proprietary server-based storage originally acquired from the CPU vendors.

"Broadening deregulation and increased competition have created tremendous growth opportunities for EMC in the telecommunications market," said Richard Blaschke, EMC's Vice President of Product Marketing. "Successful telecommunications firms such as NTC are rapidly realizing that EMC's high-performance storage systems translate into better customer service and lower operational costs."

EMC Corporation, based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's leading independent supplier of enterprise-wide intelligent information storage and retrieval technology, designing systems for mainframe, open systems and midrange environments. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC and is a member of the S&P 500 Index.