Leading Financial Institution Realizes Significant Cost Savings and Preservation of Internal Resources by Investing in VIRTERA's Vendor Neutral Virtualization Professional Services

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - October 23, 2008) - VIRTERA, a leading virtualization professional services and consulting firm specializing in maximizing virtualization ROI, announced today that Avidia Bank has selected its Green IT/Consolidation, Remote Office Optimization and Security and Compliance services to reduce IT costs and increase operational efficiencies through data center virtualization.

Avidia Bank was formed in 2007 by a merger between two Massachusetts financial institutions, Hudson Savings Bank and Westborough Bank. Today, Avidia has approximately $1 billion in assets and nine offices located in seven towns in central Massachusetts: Hudson, Westborough, Clinton, Leominster, Marlborough, Northborough and Shrewsbury. This rapid growth led the institution to explore the benefits of data center virtualization to cut IT costs, increase storage capabilities, become more environmentally responsible and free up time and resources for the bank's IT staff.

"When we changed providers for our core back office services, it became clear that we required additional servers to support third-party services, as well as new specialized software applications to serve the increasing needs of the bank's individual departments," explained Kevin Wheeler, network technician for Avidia Bank. "Furthermore, one of the biggest obstacles to managing our growth was to ensure we had a solid backup plan. We used single tape backup, and that was sufficient to meet our needs at first. However, as we grew we realized we needed more storage."

Avidia Bank selected VIRTERA for the job based on the company's multi-vendor experience, expertise and focus on customer service. "VIRTERA offered us a singular point of contact for our virtualization project," Wheeler said. "They not only offered their hands-on services and the expertise to set up our infrastructure, but they also were able to walk us through the entire process and, after the fact, help us to maintain the system at a high level. That was a huge benefit to us."

VIRTERA began the process by transitioning ten of the bank's 20 servers from physical to virtual with input from Wheeler on which existing servers should be virtualized. VIRTERA's staff even demonstrated to Wheeler how to use third-party virtual tools to maintain the quality and performance of the virtualized network. This knowledge transfer has empowered Wheeler and his small IT staff to stay informed and ahead of any firmware changes required down the road as the bank continues its growth.

"The savings that we've realized from virtualizing our environment can be best summed up by the example of how it used to take me at least a half day, sometimes more, just to create a server. Getting that same server up and running now takes 10 minutes or less," Wheeler explained. "That's a huge savings, and as we grow and inevitably add more servers, it's nice to know we can bring servers online that quickly and responsively for the benefit of the business."

"We are very pleased that our unique, collaborative approach to consulting, along with our best-of-breed suite of virtualization professional services is enabling companies like Avidia Bank to realize the full spectrum of benefits that virtualization provides," said Howard Pavony, CEO of VIRTERA. "VIRTERA's core mission is to bring virtualization solutions to our valued customers while helping them to understand its many advantages, and we look forward to furthering our vision of maximizing virtualization ROI for mid-enterprise organizations nationwide."

About Avidia Bank

Avidia Bank was created by a merger between Hudson Savings Bank and Westborough Bank. Avidia Bank opened for business on October 22, 2007. Avidia Bank has nine offices located in seven towns in central Massachusetts: Hudson, Westborough, Clinton, Leominster, Marlborough, Northborough and Shrewsbury. Avidia has approximately $1 billion in assets. For more information, visit www.avidiabank.com.

About VIRTERA

VIRTERA is a vendor agnostic, independent Information Technology (IT) professional services and consulting firm delivering virtualization technology solutions and services to companies nationwide. VIRTERA's proven vSpectrum consulting methodology uniquely ensures successful and rapid adoption of virtualization technologies while delivering an optimum return on organizations' IT investments. VIRTERA's team of certified solution architects and consultants develop, deploy and manage Virtual Infrastructure (VI) solutions designed to solve today's most challenging IT issues while its industry-unique Strategy group tests and analyzes virtualization trends across the entire virtual ecosystem. VIRTERA was founded in 2007 and maintains its corporate headquarters in New York, NY. For more information, visit www.virteratech.com.

Contact Information: Contacts: Shawn McDonald Vice President of Marketing VIRTERA (207) 363-3735 smcdonald@cri1.com Or Jackie Abramian BridgeView Marketing (for VIRTERA) (207) 439-0963 jackie@bridgeviewmarketing.com