Hitachi and BMC Software Partner to Provide Intelligent Storage Management Solutions

May 10 1999 — Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT) a worldwide provider of information processing solutions that enhance customer computing and solutional capabilities in various business environments, and BMC Software, Inc., the leader in providing solutions that improve the availability, performance and recovery of business-critical applications and solutions that provide application service assurance, today announced an alliance to jointly develop and market storage solutions providing enterprise customers with fast back-up and high-level data sharing solutions in heterogeneous environments. Products will be released throughout the year and will be marketed by each partners' current channels.

Enterprise customers continue to consistently back up critical data without confidence that data can be quickly restored and applications successfully restarted. To provide instant recovery, it is essential that storage devices have the intelligence to minimize backup requirements and off-load backup and recovery processes from the server. This partnership will result in revolutionary technology to address these customer issues.

"Hitachi is a leading supplier of storage products in the mainframe market and is now focusing on the open systems arena, while BMC Software offers strengths in database recovery, application management, and storage resource management technologies," said Dr. Jun Naruse, Division President of Data Storage and Retrieval Systems Division/Information and Telecommunications Systems, Hitachi, Ltd. "Together, Hitachi and BMC will offer multiplatform storage solutions, combining both Hitachi's strength in hardware and BMC Software's strength in software, which will enable enterprise customers to achieve the full potential of their information systems. Hitachi's Freedom Storage is the industry's most powerful storage subsystem featuring the world's fastest disk drive speed of 12,030 rpm and a maximum subsystem storage capacity of several terabytes, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at enterprise data centers, which provide multiplatform connectivity and data sharing support across S/390^®, Unix^® and Windows NT environments."

"As revealed in recent announcements, BMC Software has formed a business unit focused on enterprise storage management and application recovery with a mission of dominating the enterprise storage management market," said Mr. Vic Mahadevan, Vice President and General Manager for BMC Software's Application Recovery and Enterprise Storage Management Business Unit. "This kind of partnership between vendors such as Hitachi and BMC is essential to respond to the industry's movement toward Storage Area Networks (SANs) and the demand for server-less backups and restores. BMC is committed to integrating current network management, storage management, and backup and recovery solutions along with technology provided by partners and acquisitions to provide the only end-to-end storage management tool for the enterprise that can associate storage events with application management."

Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1997 (ended March 31, 1998) consolidated sales of 8,417 billion yen ($63.8 billion*). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment.

* At an exchange rate of 132 yen to the dollar.

BMC Software is the world's leading provider of management solutions that ensure the availability, performance, and recovery of companies' business-critical applications. They call this application service assurance, and it means that the applications companies and their customers rely on most stay up and running, around the clock. For more than 18 years, the world's leading companies have relied on BMC Software.

BMC Software is among the world's largest independent software vendors, a Forbes 500 company and is a member of the S&P 500, with fiscal year 1999 revenues exceeding $1.3 billion. The company is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices worldwide. For more information please call 800-841-2031 or 713-918-8800

Contacts: PR
Terry Kubo , Hitachi America, Ltd. (650) 244-7902

Heather Real , BMC Software, Inc. (713) 918-1649

Hitachi Freedom Storage is a trademark of Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. S/390 is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed exclusively by X/Open Company Ltd. in the U.S. and other countries. Windows NT is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other name of companies, organizations and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. To the extent there are any forward-looking statements in this release, they are necessarily subject to uncertainties based on various factors, including business conditions in BMC Software's markets, product release cycles, and competitive conditions. Further information on potential factors which could affect the Company's financial results are included in their current Forms 6-K and 20-F reports, which are on file with the SEC. BMC Software, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. BMC Software and the BMC Software logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc.