Equinox Enters Into OEM Agreement With MICROS Systems

An enhanced Equinox ESP Serial Hub will enable MICROS's 8700 hospitality management system to connect, support, and manage hundreds of highly dispersed point-of-sale devices including touch screens, printers, and kitchen display systems. Because the ESP makes these point-of-sale devices appear to be locally attached to the server hosting MICROS's application programs, response times are very short increasing employee productivity. The MICROS 8700 HMS system is a cost-effective, highly usable, point-of-sale system with open systems architecture. It features spill-resistant hardware devices, industry standard hardware peripherals, and industry standard servers. The MICROS 8700 HMS system is specifically designed to handle high usage, multiple revenue centers in luxury hotels, casinos, resorts, theme parks, stadiums, and large local and chain restaurants. Equinox' ESP Serial Hub is part of a family of intelligent network-based products that connect local or remote servers to serial communication ports throughout any facility.

"Hospitality environments are very demanding for point-of-sale systems," said Jim Dickey, Director, Hardware Solutions Group for MICROS Systems. "Performance, flexibility and reliability may be buzz-words, but these factors are truly critical. As we spec out our future systems, we select contributing suppliers who have proven to be world-class partners. After a careful review, we found Equinox had the technology and the responsive development team that best matched our needs. Equinox is very experienced in point-of-sale environments and understands the special needs of its OEM partners."

"We are very pleased to have been selected by MICROS to be a key contributor to its major hospitality systems," said Tom Garrett, Equinox Vice President of Sales. "MICROS is an industry leader with its product offerings and its well developed, world-wide sales and support organization. We expect this new agreement with MICROS will have a major impact on our revenue growth in the point-of-sale sectors of our business. It is also another demonstration of the confidence that the market has in Equinox."

Forbes Magazine recently selected Equinox as one of America's 200 Best Small Companies.

Equinox, with headquarters in Sunrise, Florida, makes software and hardware products that remove the communications burden from server operating systems and provide communications port management and remote control capabilities. The products are marketed to end-users under the Equinox brand name through a worldwide two-tier distribution channel and network of value-added resellers (VARs). Equinox also creates customized versions of its products for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) which sell and support the products worldwide under their own brand names. Further information on Equinox is available at www.equinox.com.

MICROS Systems, Inc. provides enterprise applications for the hospitality industry worldwide. Over 120,000 MICROS systems are currently installed in table and quick service restaurants, hotels, motels, casinos and leisure and entertainment operations in more than 130 countries. MICROS provides property management systems and central reservation and customer information solutions under the brand MICROS-Fidelio for more than 10,000 hotels worldwide. MICROS stock is traded through NASDAQ under the symbol MCRS.

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