Virgin Mobile selects GH product suite from Green Hat Consulting to provide added-value capabilities to its TIBCO implementation

LONDON - September 17th, 2003 - Green Hat Consulting announced today that Virgin Mobile has licensed the GH Tester product (formerly known as RV Tester) to streamline and automate their extensive testing procedures on integration projects involving TIBCO ActiveEnterprise® software. In addition, Virgin Mobile has licensed the other products in the family, GH Tracker and GH Viewer (previously RV Tracker and RendezView respectively), in order to ensure that live TIBCO-based projects can be monitored and managed in real-time, thus providing early warning of potential problems and root cause analysis capability should operational issues occur.

Matthew Roake (Design Manager) at Virgin Mobile, commented "We believe the GH tools purchased from Green Hat Consulting will enable us to get the best out of our TIBCO infrastructure. From an operational point of view, the ability to capture all of our messages for analysis and general "safekeeping" is an important reassurance to us. These tools will assist us in performance tuning, error handling and resolving operational support issues."

GH Tracker, which provides this capability, is effectively a "black box" flight recorder that captures all, or a user-defined subset of, messages travelling around the network. The product provides powerful search and filter capabilities allowing erroneous or damaged messages to be quickly found, repaired and, if appropriate, republished onto the network. Closely aligned to GH Tracker is GH Viewer which highlights potential hotspots and bottlenecks in the messaging infrastructure, enabling corrective action to be taken before a potentially expensive service outage occurs.

"On the development and testing side" continues Matthew Roake, "We are constantly striving to speed up the delivery process, while maintaining quality. To keep ahead in our rapidly moving market, it is important that we are able to develop new IT services quickly and have them ready and tested to support new product launches when the business needs them. We anticipate that GH Tester will provide us with what we need to deliver a rapid and high quality EAI development and test process."

GH Tester provides a user-friendly graphical interface to replace traditional command-line tools and custom development. Users can see messages clearly for the first time. They can create and manipulate messages and share them easily with colleagues, both locally and remotely. Message streams can be captured, stored and played back at will.

However, GH Tester's main purpose, is to automate testing. Simple screens help users to build up powerful test sequences, more quickly than it previously took to create a custom program. Both stubs and jigs are supported, allowing early isolated unit testing of adapters and integration components, and simulation of missing adapters. Tests can be executed at a touch of a button and the results are compared with the test's benchmark results to produce comprehensive reports. Incorporation of a command-line mode allows testing to be included automatically as part of the adapter build process.

Investigations indicate that users can expect to see significant savings in the time and cost of unit and integration testing on a typical integration project.These savings make for a very compelling business case, as the returns will outweigh the investment required many times over.

About Virgin Mobile
Virgin Mobile is now established as the most successful virtual network operator in the world, and is the UK's fifth network. Since its launch in November 1999 it has attracted 3 million customers, making it one of the fastest growing mobile phone companies in history.

Virgin Mobile is a 50:50 joint venture company between Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile, and is the UK's first mobile virtual operator.

It has scored a number of firsts, including being the first operator to scrap peak rate calls, introduce a daily discounting tariff, the first company in the world to introduce an integrated MP3 mobile phone and the first company to offer all of its customers a content-rich voice portal with the launch of its 4321 service.

Virgin Mobile has recently introduced a new text tariff, which costs customers 3p per on-net text sent in the UK.

In the UK, Virgin Mobile phones are available direct on 0845 6000 600; on the web at www.virginmobile.com; or on the High Street at over 6,000 outlets including Virgin Megastores, Virgin Megastores Xpress, Sanity, Sainsbury, Tesco, Safeway, Asda, John Lewis, Littlewoods, Argos, The Link, Dixons, Carphone Warehouse, Comet, Phones 4 U, TOMO, Woolworths, Toys R Us and Rymans.

Virgin Mobile employs 1,500 staff on four sites, Trowbridge, London, Daventry and Middlesborough. It was recognised as one of the top 25 places to work in Britain in the Financial Times in March 2003.

About Green Hat
Since 1996, Green Hat has been providing expertise in the use of integration technologies to deliver cost-effective solutions to real business issues. Our suite of GH Software products facilitates significant savings in time and cost to organisations implementing SOA architectures using messaging-based technologies. Our customers range from the niche financial trading boutique to international telecom players and investment banks, a diverse range of businesses, united through their need for scaleable, reliable, integrated solutions.

For more information about our products and services, or to download free software and tools, visit our website: www.greenhat.com.

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