NextNine Awarded Patent for Support Automation

NEW YORK & TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2006--NextNine, the leading global provider of proactive, automated, remote service and support solutions for business-critical systems, today announced that it has been awarded patent number 7,076,400 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office entitled, "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPORT OF EMBEDDED DEVICES." The patent protects the NextNine Service Automation (NSA) platform, and its unique, innovative ability to automate proactive, remote monitoring, maintenance and support.

This patent strongly validates NextNine's technology as the pioneer in enabling enterprises to deliver proactive, automated maintenance and support services. Here, NSA's Service Center - the central server located at the enterprise's site - and the Virtual Support Engineer (VSE) - the maintenance server located at their customers site - initiate and determine the type of maintenance to be performed by proactively and automatically selecting and managing maintenance processes. These include preventive maintenance, self healing, remote access, proactive monitoring and others. NextNine's innovative invention ensures comprehensive assurance of superior service and support delivery in B2B distributed network environments, facilitating increased customer satisfaction.

"We are both honored and proud that the U.S. Patent Office has awarded NextNine the "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPORT OF EMBEDDED DEVICE patent," said Adi Dulberg, CEO, NextNine. "NextNine is changing the landscape of technical service and support, by making processes proactive and automated. Our solutions, time and time again, have dramatically improved customer satisfaction levels and by extension, customer retention; receipt of this patent ensures the protection, and NextNine's role as the sole inventor, of Support Automation technology."

NextNine Service Automation, that incorporates the technology covered in this patent, is already being leveraged by hundreds of organizations around the world including leading enterprises such as Motorola, GE Healthcare, Openwave, Comverse, Allscripts, MetaSwitch, and airwide solutions. This technology is applicable across verticals including Telecom and Broadband, Healthcare and Finance.

NextNine Support Automation, honored by Deloitte, Gartner and Customer Inter@ction Solutions for technological innovation and effectiveness, represents a new paradigm in technical service and support that enables vendors to virtually "be there" 24X7, monitoring the systems for which they are responsible, proactively identifying and detecting problem symptoms. This new service model enables both early problem detection and self-healing; resolution can be achieved at the problem root before it manifests itself in the system, therefore preventing service disruptions and downtime.

For additional information on the patent, please visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark website at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm and enter the patent number mentioned above.

About NextNine

NextNine, founded in 1998, is the leading global technology provider of proactive, automated, remote service and support solutions for business-critical systems. The company's distributed software platform provides remote automation of service and support processes, with key functionality including proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance, installed-base inventory tracking, software distribution, system audits and best-practices analysis. The NextNine Service Automation suite has been deployed by global leaders such as Comverse (NASDAQ: CMVT), GE Healthcare, Openwave, Allscripts, MetaSwitch and airwide solutions. For more information, visit us at www.NextNine.com