British Airways Pilots E-Services Growth With EMC; World-Class Airline Doubles Size of EMC E-Infostructure to Ensure Reliable E-Commerce Thrust.

Business/Technology Editors

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2000

British Airways, one of the world's largest international airlines, has built its reputation for world-class customer service on a flexible, reliable E-Infostructure. Now, as it implements ambitious plans to employ the Internet even more broadly as a key distribution channel for reservations, ticketing, and customer information, British Air has more than doubled the size of its EMC E-Infostructure. The company has added 30 terabytes of EMC Enterprise Storage and is employing EMC's market-leading information protection software even more broadly than ever before.

"Even though companies have talked about the need for 24x7 availability of information for years, e-business puts the requirement in a whole new light," said Peter Radcliffe, British Airways' General Manager, Central Services. "At one time, access to our systems was primarily limited to British Airways' employees. Now that the Internet has emerged as a customer service channel, there is a much larger world of passengers, as well as suppliers and business partners who need access to our Internet infrastructure all the time. In recognition of that, we chose EMC Symmetrix storage and software to ensure our Web site is available around the clock to a growing audience."

Geoff Want, British Airways' General Manager, Operations Control, noted, "As we continue to put more airline operations online, reliable access to information is becoming more fundamental to our business success. We simply can't get planes in the air and passengers ticketed without dependable access to real-time and accurate information. EMC's sophisticated software ensures people can continue to get information even if there is hardware failure or a data center goes offline unexpectedly."

"Another potential roadblock to information access is haphazard management of a rapidly expanding infrastructure. We have customer databases, which, in some cases are growing as much as a gigabyte of information a day. EMC has the tools to manage such rapid growth smoothly and efficiently and still ensure the data will always be safe and usable."

British Airways, based in London, relies on more than 50 terabytes of EMC Enterprise Storage across its IBM and Amdahl mainframe systems as well as Sun, IBM RS/6000, IBM SP/2 and IBM AIX servers. EMC Symmetrix systems deliver highly reliable storage to mission-critical applications, including reservations, Oracle and e-business.

The carrier will broaden its years-long use of EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), the world's most popular business continuity software. SRDF will provide real-time mirroring of e-business information stored on EMC Symmetrix systems based in British Airlines' primary and back-up data centers.

In addition to SRDF, British Airways relies on EMC TimeFinder software to provide online backup and restore capabilities and EMC ControlCenter to deliver centralized management of storage across its enterprise. In expanding its relationship with EMC, British Airways became the holder of the 15,000th EMC data protection software license. EMC's team of highly trained Professional Services experts assisted British Airways with its recent EMC implementation for e-business.

"The fact that EMC has sold 15,000 licenses of its data mirroring software is strong testimony that EMC's products are the most tested and proven products in the storage industry," said Radcliffe. "We've used EMC business continuity solutions to protect our worldwide reservations data for years, so it's only natural we would extend this safety net to our growing e-business infrastructure."

"For British Airways, storage is a strategic decision that has ramifications across its entire business," said Mike Ruffolo EMC's Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Services and Marketing. "To ensure that decision leads to business success, British Airways is safeguarding one of its most precious resources - information - with an EMC E-Infostructure. With EMC, British Airways will assure that its customers, employees and business partners will be able to access an expanding universe of information without delay."

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.emc.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage, E-Infostructure, SRDF, TimeFinder, and ControlCenter are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.