Hewitt Associates First with IBM eServer Parallel Sysplex Technology; Top Benefits Consulting and Delivery Firm Chooses IBM z900.

High Tech & Business Editors

LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill. & ARMONK, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 2001

Hewitt Associates and IBM today announced that Hewitt has implemented the first IBM eServer z900 Parallel Sysplex clustering solution. The multi-million dollar investment includes six IBM z900 enterprise servers, enabling Hewitt to supply near continuous benefits administration service to their clients' 12 million employees worldwide.

Hewitt, the largest provider of multi-service benefits outsourcing in the U.S., is using six IBM z900 servers to support the growth of their robust benefits administration system. This system fully integrates defined benefit, defined contribution and health and welfare administration and easily integrates with other systems via open standards. With IBM's Parallel Sysplex technology, Hewitt has the capacity, flexibility and availability required to serve all of their clients' needs.

"We are committed to delivering benefits better and more efficiently through innovative, world-class technology," said Perry Cliburn, CIO, Hewitt Associates. "With IBM's Parallel Sysplex technology there's more fault tolerance and more efficient utilization of processor resources. This architecture allows us to support more memory-intensive workloads and provides us with capacity that will serve us well into the future."

Hewitt handles nearly 54 million customer interactions annually in real time, through the Internet, interactive voice response (IVR) system and Benefits Center. The reliability, scalability and industry-leading security features of the z900 will enable Hewitt to meet the especially heavy demand during the fall enrollment period when customer interactions reach their peak.

"With their purchase of six z900's, Hewitt is raising the bar on IT standards for the human resources industry," said Dave Carlucci, General Manager IBM Americas. "We are proud to have Hewitt Associates, a leader in its field, as the first enterprise running our Parallel Sysplex technology on an IBM eServer."

The IBM Parallel Sysplex architecture features a unique data-sharing environment. Unlike some clustering technologies that partition databases, in a Parallel Sysplex cluster all processing power and data can be available to all servers. In the unlikely event of a server failure, this "shared data" design allows the workload to be distributed across the entire Parallel Sysplex cluster and resumed without interrupting applications or operations.

About Hewitt

Hewitt Associates LLC is a global management consulting and employee benefit delivery firm. With 2000 firmwide revenues of nearly 1.3 billion, Hewitt is the largest provider of benefit outsourcing programs, administering major benefit delivery programs to more than 12 million employees, retirees and their dependents.

About IBM

IBM is the world's number one server company. IBM enterprise servers, including the IBM eServer z900 and S/390, support the world's most successful businesses and organizations by providing industry-leading levels of scalability, availability and security for large-scale e-business and enterprise computing needs. The enterprise server platform is a leader in running multiple, diverse, mission-critical workloads and applications, including e-business, financial and administrative, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning.

The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM e-business logo with the following descriptive term "server" following it.

The following are either trademarks or registered of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both: IBM, the IBM e-business logo, zSeries, S/390 and z/OS. All others are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

UNIX is a registered trademark of THE OPEN GROUP in the United States and other countries.