EIGHT UNISYS ES7000 SERVERS TO RUN FAST-GROWING WEBSITE, CONSOLIDATE WORKLOAD OF 150 SERVERS AT NETHERLANDS' BANK LABOUCHERE.

Building on its initial success with Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 technology, Bank Labouchere has ordered six additional ES7000s to run Alex, its popular e-brokerage website, Unisys said today. Two ES7000s were ordered by Bank Labouchere earlier in 2000.

The Unisys ES7000 servers will provide the Dutch investment banking firm with the very large transaction capacity, uninterrupted system availability and high-end security essential to high-volume, round-the-clock Web-based securities trading.

At the same time, the bank's use of Microsoft and Intel technology enable the company to benefit from the new economics of large-scale e-business computing, tackling workloads that once could be handled only by mainframes or large UNIX-based systems, but at a fraction of the price.

The servers' large input-output resources, critical to supporting large volumes of simultaneous user transactions, will play a key role in enabling the bank to expand availability of Alex to international customers.

Sales of servers based on the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture passed the 250-unit milestone in December 2000, just three months after Microsoft unveiled the operating system needed to exploit the full enterprise capabilities of the server technology.

Shipments of CMP-based servers, which are sold by Unisys under the Unisys e-@ction ES7000 Enterprise Server brand, began in late March 2000.

Bank Labouchere offers international investment banking and corporate finance services for major institutional investors as well as private banking and leasing of stocks for individual investors. It has offices in Amsterdam and London and is part of the Dexia Group consortium.

The Alex Web-based securities ordering system, www.alex.nl, which has been rated best in its class among Dutch e-brokerage systems by leading Dutch market research analysts, enables trades on the Euronext, all the European bourses and the major U.S. stock exchanges.

"Growth in the use of the Internet for serious commerce and in our international banking services compounded two key strategic challenges for our company: exploding demand for securities trading over the Alex e-brokerage site, and a proliferation of servers handling countless individual functions," said Bart van der Vlis, executive director ICT at Bank Labouchere. "The Unisys ES7000 enables us to address both challenges, providing ample headroom for growth and giving systems administrators a simplified way of managing a large array of solutions from a single control point."

The decision to host the Alex e-brokerage on ES7000s resulted from Bank Labouchere's evaluation of the technology last year, when the company began consolidating the workload of a server farm running over 30 Windows NT-based applications onto a single 32-processor ES7000.

That effort is enabling Bank Labouchere to streamline the costs and complexities of managing over 150 smaller servers, each of which had been administered individually. The benefits of consolidation are made possible by the server's support for partitioning, which enables administrators to create "servers within a server" capable of executing multiple functions.

The orders also included Unisys technical consulting services and EMC Symmetrix storage.

"Taking maximum advantage of the ES7000's unique capabilities, Bank Labouchere is at the vanguard of a new, creative way of planning and deploying enterprise solution architectures for e-business," said Peter Samson, Unisys vice president and general manager, Technology Sales Development. "Bank Labouchere's visionary use of advanced server technology to make serious, high-volume e-commerce a reality demonstrates the kind of creative problem solving companies can do when equipped with the array of new tools provided by the ES7000."

The Unisys ES7000 provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class e-business computing and well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology. Designed for the power of future Intel IA-64 Itanium processors, the ES7000 is based on Unisys revolutionary Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture.

A de-facto-standard architecture for large-scale Microsoft- and Intel-based servers, Unisys is providing CMP technology under OEM agreements to Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi and ICL.

The ES7000 accommodates up to 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, which can be field-upgraded to Intel IA-64 Itanium processors when that technology becomes available or combined with Itanium processors in the same server. These advantages enable the ES7000 to match the performance of UNIX systems in enterprise-class e-business and other critical applications at a fraction of the price.

Unisys is an e-business solutions company whose 36,000 employees help customers in 100 countries apply information technology to seize opportunities and overcome challenges of the Internet economy. Unisys people integrate and deliver the solutions, services, platforms and network infrastructure required by business and government to transform their organizations for success in this new era.