Aventail Achieves Leader Quadrant Position in First SSL VPN Magic Quadrant

Seattle, WA – April 11, 2003 – Aventail Corporation (www.aventail.com) today announced it was positioned in the leader quadrant for Gartner’s first SSL VPN Magic Quadrant. The report, prepared by John Girard, vice president and research director at Gartner, is the second Gartner report this year that positions Aventail in the leader quadrant (see 2003 Managed Remote Access Quadrant at http://www.aventail.com/news_and_events/press/2003/03_26_03.asp). Of the 14 vendors evaluated for display in the SSL VPN quadrant, Aventail was identified in the leader quadrant based on Gartner’s criteria, which includes the ability to dominate in horizontal and vertical markets, raise the competitive bar and change the course of the industry. Criteria for vision positioning is based on mind share and industry influence to set direction, breadth of the solution, enterprise focus/message based on Gartner analyst assessment, and value-added services.

An industry leader and SSL VPN visionary, Aventail is focused on delivering secure remote access on any device, from any place, from any network, and provides authorized users with access to any corporate resource, including both Web and client/server applications. Serving large enterprises with SSL VPN technology since 1996, including Basell Polyolefins, Cerner Corporation, Deloitte Consulting, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, and Ernst & Young Global LLP and more, Aventail brings seven years worth of SSL VPN experience to its customers and channel partners. According to Gartner, the emerging SSL VPN market surged and gained popular awareness during the fourth quarter of 2002 and offers good short-term ROI to mitigate risks of early products and start-up vendors. The report highlights that Gartner has been writing about SSL VPNs for at least five years as a thinner method of establishing private remote access sessions over the Internet, and that Gartner has validated the benefits enjoyed by early adopters.

“Many enterprises implement full-blown VPNs in cases where simpler, easier, less-costly private access may be created by using SSL-enabled Web applications,” according to the report authored by Girard. The report also states that “The simplicity and portability of SSL VPNs can lower the cost to implement remote user VPNs for company-owned work stations and also for access from non-company systems such as personal computers. Enterprises seeking easier and more flexible ways to deploy secure remote access should consider SSL VPNs for new investments, and as upgrades for legacy VPNs.”

The SSL VPN Magic Quadrant offers guidelines for vendor evaluations and includes an overview of vendors that represent a mix of software servers, appliance gateways and managed services as solutions for enterprise intranet remote access.

Fourteen vendors received a ranking in the Magic Quadrant based on completeness of vision to develop visionary ideas and user needs for the long term and on their ability to execute in the market in the near term. According to Gartner, completeness of vision is a vendor’s ability to adopt longer-term values and to cause changes in prevailing industry by its actions. Gartner defines the ability to execute as a vendor’s ability to attract and keep enterprise business by being visible in the competitive landscape as a brand name and as a solution that can be validated from independent sources, including channel support, customer references and case studies. “Being recognized by Gartner in two Magic Quadrants speaks directly to our ability to establish and define the technologies that will pioneer advances in this market,” said Evan Kaplan, president and CEO. “We look forward to working with our large customer base to further advance this market with the industry’s most powerful and flexible clientless VPN for large and small-to-medium sized enterprises.”

About Aventail
Aventail’s momentum in the VPN market comes as customers are increasingly looking for remote access and extranet solutions that are easier to manage, cheaper to support, and more secure than IPSec VPNs.

Based on the sixth generation of Aventail’s SSL VPN technology platform, the company’s solutions do not require the expensive deployment and management of clients and provide transparent, anywhere access to any application, including Web, legacy client/server, file transfer, terminal servers, and mainframe.

The company has received numerous awards and accolades from the industry’s top publications and analyst firms. These include a listing in the leader quadrant in the Gartner Managed Remote Access and SSL VPN Magic Quadrants; recognition as one of Computerworld’s 100 Emerging Companies and Upside’s Hot 100; and winner of InfoWorld’s Hot Product, Network Magazine’s Product of the Year award, Giga Information Group’s Emerging Technology Scene – Best Overall Network Product, and the Crossroads A-List Award.

For more information on Aventail, visit www.aventail.com. For a copy of the report, visit http://www.aventail.com/forms/analystreports_form.asp.

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Aventail, Aventail.Net, Aventail ASAP, Aventail EX-1500, and Aventail OnDemand, and their respective logos are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of Aventail Corporation. Other product and company names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted April, 2003 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission, which permission should not be deemed to be an endorsement of any company or product depicted in the quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is Gartner, Inc.’s opinion and is an analytical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It measures vendors against Gartner defined criteria for a marketplace. The positioning of vendors within a Magic Quadrant is based on the complex interplay of many factors. Gartner does not advise enterprises to select only those firms in the “Leaders” quadrant. In some situations, firms in the Visionary, Challenger, or Niche Player quadrants may be the right matches for an enterprise’s requirements. Well-informed vendor selection decisions should rely on more than a Magic Quadrant. Gartner research is intended to be one of many information sources including other published information and direct analyst interaction. Gartner, Inc. expressly disclaims all warranties, express or implied, of fitness of this research for a particular purpose.

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