Special Section: SNW, Fall 2004 - More News From SNW:

Permabit Customer Recognized For Excellence In Compliance

Permabit announced that Seattle-Northwest Securities Corporation was awarded the Storage Networking World Best Practices in Storage Award for Industry Regulation Compliance and Corporate Governance. Seattle-Northwest uses Permabit's Permeon Compliance Vault software for secure email record retention in accordance with SEC 17a-4, a government regulation that specifies the storage media requirements for retaining electronic records within financial services firms. The company was honored in a category based on compliance initiatives that met or exceeded industry regulations as specified by the SEC, Patriot Act, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, DoD and CFR.

Seattle Northwest Securities, an investment banking firm, is the largest underwriter of bonds in the Pacific Northwest and has the largest fixed-income sales and trading department in the region. The company's compliance environment includes archiving of emails and other electronic documents that have protection and retention requirements as outlined by SEC 17a-4. The Permeon solution replaced optical disk technology within Seattle Northwest's IT environment, which runs Microsoft Exchange and email archiving software from iLumin.

"Regulatory compliance is one of our most important IT initiatives for 2004," said Chu Abad, vice president of information technology. "When we evaluated technology from EMC, HP, Network Appliance and Permabit, we chose Permabit because the solution allowed us to use industry-standard hardware and was far more cost-effective than competitive products. Additionally, Permabit's compliance solution enabled us to be significantly faster in our daily internal audits with less administrative overhead, and we can now respond more rapidly in the case of an SEC regulatory compliance audit."

"It's an honor to be recognized in April of this year and then again today by Storage Networking World, Computerworld, and SNIA as best-in-class for compliance," said Stephen Ellis, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Permabit. "Seattle-Northwest is a great example of how Permabit's Permeon software can help financial services firms efficiently and cost-effectively solve their IT challenges surrounding regulatory compliance."