Abbey National Selects Proxima Technology's Centauri Business Service Manager to Analyze and Report on Service Quality.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 20, 2003

Proxima Technology, supplier of Business Service Management Software that uses the Six Sigma quality management process to improve business service, today announced that Abbey National--one of the UK's largest personal financial services companies--were using Centauri Business Service Manager (Centauri) to assist their business efficiency initiatives.

Centauri enables Abbey National to reduce cost of service provisioning by utilizing the systems management tools embedded with their applications and replace the expensive proprietary management products from third parties.

"Increasingly, major IT vendors--such as Microsoft (NYSE: MSFT), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM)--are providing systems management tools as part of their base products in order to drive down the application running costs for their customers," said Jon Ratcliffe, Head of Enterprise Support at Abbey National. "Centauri provides Abbey National with a cost-effective way of bringing these different management tools under a single umbrella, this way we can manage the service of these applications collectively rather than separate, discrete components. This gives us a big picture of our systems' service quality, more akin to the way our customers and users experience it, and allows us to bring IT 'out of the backroom and into the boardroom' in terms of the information we provide."

Centauri uses the data retrieved from these various management tools to analyze and report on service quality. This helps Abbey National's IT department to ensure that application service remains at the level required by the business. Quality shortfalls are highlighted by Centauri, which then uses Six Sigma quality management process to make necessary improvements. The information about service quality is shared with IT executives, business process owners and alike using the Centauri real-time digital dashboards. This keeps managers informed of problems, and allows them to take the necessary mitigating steps.

"For a company of Abbey National's scale, it is imperative that IT service quality equates to understanding business quality," says Jon Ratcliffe. "Giving business process owners this perspective helps them improve the operational efficiency of our business."

Abbey National cites ease of implementation, flexibility of use, and high standards of consultancy and support as the key strengths of Proxima Technology and the Centauri Business Service Management Solution.

About Abbey National

Abbey National is one of the UK's largest personal financial services companies and the country's second largest mortgage lender.

Abbey National and its subsidiaries offer a comprehensive range of personal financial services, including savings and investments, mortgages, banking, pensions, unit trusts, life and general insurance products, as well as secured and unsecured lending, to over 16 million customers in United Kingdom.

About Proxima Technology

Proxima Technology provides software and services that use Six Sigma's process improvement method to improve business service and accountability through service level measurement, reporting, and problem notification in distributed computing environments. Centauri retrieves data from major systems management tools, including those supplied by BMC Software (NYSE: BMC), Computer Associates (NYSE: CA), IBM (NYSE: IBM), and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ).

Proxima Technology is headquartered in Denver, CO, with sales offices across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information about Proxima Technology, please visit: www.proxima-tech.com/.

Proxima Technology and Centauri are trademarks of Proxima Technology, Inc.