Red Hat Providing VeriSign With Linux-Based Servers

VeriSign is migrating over 2,000 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; Move will reduce operating costs

RALEIGH, NC—September 9, 2003—Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the world's premier open source and Linux provider and VeriSign, Inc (Nasdaq: VRSN), the leading provider of critical infrastructure services for the Internet and telecommunications networks, today announced that VeriSign has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their platform for over 2000 servers operating across all company business units

The migration to Red Hat has begun with VeriSign's Naming and Directory Services business unit and the deployment of Oracle on Linux for several corporate applications. Plans to continue the migration will occur over the next 18 months throughout the entire company.

VeriSign maintains the definitive database of over 27 million Web addresses in .com and .net - the world's most recognizable top-level domains and responds to over 9 billion DNS look-ups daily. This platform includes the| critical infrastructure for| the 13 globally deployed global top level domain name servers answering domain name system requests for all .com| and .net domains and the| A Root server, the hierarchical top of the| Internet's root server system| and the most heavily| utilized domain name server.

Through its Naming and Directory Services business, VeriSign is responsible for ensuring that the information and communications of the Internet are delivered promptly and to the right addresses. As more and more businesses and enterprises move their business functions to the Internet, VeriSign must maintain near total accuracy and load-balancing for the billions of daily DNS queries. In a significant cost-reduction maneuver, VeriSign is migrating over 2,000 servers, many of them boasting extremely high performance, from Unix to Red Hat Linux running on Intel chips.

"When Red Hat first launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were surprised by the new pricing model and initially compared the cost of in-house development of a distribution. Because we run dozens of independent applications we quickly realized that conformance to Red Hat Enterprise Linux standards would be critical to gain third party software support," said Dave Pool, vice president of infrastructure engineering at VeriSign. "VeriSign is migrating several significant databases to Linux, including Siebel Sales Force Automation, Clarify sales support, and business intelligence and decision support applications from Informatica and Primus."

Pool expects to achieve a substantially complete implementation within another eighteen months, which should lend another doubling of processing power. "Other companies beginning with Red Hat today could move much faster, because the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel architectures are far more advanced today than it was three years ago".

While VeriSign has a corporate strategy of keeping multiple vendors for all items, the success of Red Hat has spurred VeriSign to make an exception and make Red Hat its sole Linux supplier. "We have five server vendors, just to get aggressive pricing, but only Red Hat for Linux," according to Pool.

To read the complete case study on the migration of VeriSign's architecture to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit http://www.redhat.com/index.html.

About VeriSign
VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), delivers critical infrastructure services that make the Internet and telecommunications networks more intelligent, reliable and secure. Every day VeriSign helps thousands of businesses and millions of consumers connect, communicate, and transact with confidence. Additional news and information about the company is available at http://www.verisign.com/.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the world's premier open source and Linux provider. Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. and has offices worldwide. Please visit Red Hat on the Web at http://www.redhat.com/index.html.

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