Quazal Technologies Standardizes on IBM for Online Game Hosting Infrastructure

Strengthens Ability to Support Rapid Growth in Game Session Hosting Services

ARMONK, NY and MONTREAL - Quazal Technologies, the leading provider of networking middleware to the games industry and makers of the award-winning Net-Z, Rendez-Vous and Spark! online multiplayer products, has selected IBM (NYSE: IBM) to support its rapid growth in the global games market.

Challenged by the difficulty of building and operating large, online game infrastructures, game publishers are turning to Quazal for solutions. In order to meet the increasingly complex needs of publishers and continue its expansion globally, Quazal required a platform that could scale to meet increasing player load, support unpredictable traffic spikes and speed new feature deployment.

Quazal chose IBM as the key technology and services provider to migrate its platform from Hewlett-Packard DL Servers to IBM BladeCenter servers. As a result, the company has achieved a new level of capacity, performance and manageability to support their rapidly expanding community hosting business.

“At the end of the day, it wasn’t about who could make the cheapest box -- it was about who could build high performance and efficient systems that will allow Quazal to market our solutions and scale customer environments faster and more reliably than ever before,” said Henry Ryan, COO, Quazal Technologies. “IBM proved that they could outperform the competition with BladeCenter. We are expanding into the global games marketplace at breakneck speed, and it’s critical that Quazal continues to deliver a superior platform to our current and future customers.”

IBM integrated its BladeCenter servers with Quazal’s middleware solutions and community environments. The combined offering delivers high performance, redundancy and scalability -- attributes that are vital to the success of online games -- while using less energy and lowering costs.

“IBM is dedicated to helping Quazal deliver a high performance experience to their user community,” said David Laux, IBM Global executive, games and interactive entertainment. “Providing our combination of hardware, services and industry expertise will enable Quazal to concentrate on its global expansion and deliver the increased services for which publishers are asking.”

About Quazal
Quazal is the leading supplier of multiplayer middleware solutions for the entertainment industry. World-class publishers such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, THQ, Codemasters, Midway and Capcom are joining the ranks of dozens of studios and independent developers that use Quazal’s products to propel the next generation of multiplayer games. In 2000, Quazal revolutionized network programming by rendering obsolete the traditional packet/socket paradigm. In 2005, Quazal launched a fully featured lobby service, widely regarded as the most innovative and flexible offering on the market. Quazal’s products are currently available for “PlayStation®2,” “PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable),” “PLAYSTATION®3,” Xbox®, Xbox 360™, Windows®, Pocket PC, and Linux. For more information and demonstrations visit http://www.quazal.com.

About IBM
For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.

*Xbox is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

*Quazal Rendez-Vous and Quazal Spark! are trademarks of Quazal Technologies, Inc.