Priceline.com Delivers Greater Customer Choice and Unprecedented Respo

Priceline.com Delivers Greater Customer Choice and Unprecedented Response Times with Quest Software Database Management

    Business Editors/High-Tech Editors

    IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 2, 2005--

Quest Solutions Enable Priceline.com to Achieve Optimal E-Commerce Performance and Availability
    Quest Software Inc. (Nasdaq:QSFT), a leading provider of application, database and Windows management solutions, today announced that priceline.com has successfully enhanced its customer experience with the assistance of Quest Software's SharePlex(R) and Quest Central(R) for Oracle. In 2004, priceline.com enhanced its airline tickets service to give customers a choice. They could search for exact flight times and airlines from a list of low published fares. Or, for potentially greater savings, they could use priceline.com's Name Your Own Price(R) service, where they agree to be flexible with regards to airlines and flight times. Priceline.com sought to offer these new choices while maintaining aggressive service level agreements for its quickly growing user base. With Quest SharePlex for Oracle and Quest Central for Oracle, the project was an overwhelming success.
    When priceline.com began to implement this new service, it discovered that an infrastructure upgrade was also necessary due to projected resource requirements. Incurring downtime for the upgrade was not an option. Priceline.com overcame the challenges of the new program by matching military discipline with Quest Software's products and best practices.
    "During the rollout of our new retail system, we used Quest products to maximize the performance of our database and increase the quality of our backend code, resulting in improved service levels to customers even as the volume of customer requests more than doubled," said Ron Rose, CIO of priceline.com. "Additionally, utilizing rolling upgrades enabled by Quest's SharePlex database availability product, we were able to remain online at all times during the rollout of the retail system."
    Rose added: "Quest SharePlex creates a real-time, usable replica database while maintaining data synchronization. Making use of SharePlex's ability to seamlessly replicate bi-directionally in mixed Oracle and operating system version environments, priceline.com not only uses Quest SharePlex to enable 'live' rolling upgrades, but also speeds up customer response times by taking advantage of the available secondary database to load balance service queries. This provides us with true horizontal scalability in an Oracle database system. Being able to switch users between SharePlex synchronized databases at will has played an important role in the efficiency and effectiveness of rolling out priceline.com's new service."
    To maintain efficiently performing databases, priceline.com uses Quest Central for Oracle, a performance and optimization console for database code tuning, administration, space management, and diagnosis of issues. Quest Central for Oracle provides recommendations on how to tune code so queried data flows quickly and end user response time is minimal.
    Rose added: "We use a third-party metrics tool on a monthly basis to test our Web site's availability compared to other sites. According to that independent data, our e-commerce system consistently ranks as an industry leader in both availability and response time, even while the customer shopping requests have increased."
    "With the assistance of Quest, priceline.com's e-commerce Web site now scales to handle thousands more queries while delivering unprecedented availability levels and broader customer choice," said John Theron, director of product management, enterprise database solutions, Quest Software. "We are proud to provide operational efficiency to world-class organizations like priceline.com."

    About Quest's Database Management Solutions

    Quest Software, a leading provider of heterogeneous database management solutions for open systems, delivers award-winning products that simplify and automate the management of Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sybase and MySQL databases. With built-in expertise and in-depth functionality, Quest's database management solutions increase user productivity and application code quality. Quest's core database offerings simplify database management and can be used by all levels of developers and DBAs to increase performance and availability, and facilitate code optimization and change management.

    About Quest Software Inc.

    Quest Software Inc. delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 18,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest Software, with headquarters in Irvine, can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.
    Quest, Quest Software, SharePlex and Quest Central are registered trademarks of Quest Software Inc. The Quest Software logo and all other Quest Software product or service names and slogans are registered trademarks or trademarks of Quest Software Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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CONTACT: Quest Software Inc. Nicole Tamms, 949-754-8536 nicole.tamms@quest.com

KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: HARDWARE SOFTWARE NETWORKING INTERNET E-COMMERCE PRODUCT MARKETING AGREEMENTS SOURCE: Quest Software Inc.

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