Magex Undergoes Multi-Million Dollar Upgrade; Financial Clearing House Infrastructure Now Ranks Among Best in the World.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 29, 2000

Digital commerce service Magex announced today a multi-million dollar upgrade to its existing financial clearing-house infrastructure allowing it to process over 200,000 registrations a day and 40 million transactions a month. Implementing best-of-breed solutions from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SEMA, Level 3, Portal, and EMC, the system is prepared to expand seamlessly across markets as new DRM platforms are adopted in publishing, software, video and film.

"The Magex upgrade was done with four main criteria in mind," said Glen Jennison, Head of IT and Operations at Magex. "Reliability, security, capability and scalability. Magex wants to be the global leader in digital rights management and now we have the back end to support that goal. As a leader in this environment we need to be able to upgrade our infrastructure with minimum disruption to our customers. Any downtime costs our customers revenue so it was important that additional capacity can be easily added."

Magex now has more than 50 servers and over eight terabytes of disk storage available to satisfy its data requirements. The entire system is constructed to an N+1 model with mirrored back-up and swappable disks. Magex can now easily handle the installation of up to 200,000 Magex customers per day and over 40 million transactions a month with the space and technology readily available to increase these numbers.

Magex is a global digital commerce service that allows businesses to sell digital content including music, video images, books, or business information securely and efficiently online. By delivering the persistent protection of copyrights alongside a simple, trusted payment process, Magex addresses many of the security and payment problems surrounding d-commerce. As a result, businesses can feel confident in offering their best products for download and their customers will appreciate a broader, richer product choice. Through Magex, customers will be able to access information on a pay-per-view basis while content providers protect their copyright from illegal misuse and collect royalty payments for very small transactions.

About Magex

Magex's global digital commerce service is built on sophisticated digital rights management technology provided by InterTrust, the MetaTrust Utility (Nasdaq:ITRU). It delivers persistent protection of digital content and rights alongside a trusted payment process and financial clearinghouse. This allows consumers to pay safely and instantly for digital content purchased via an electronic wallet, a Magex software application resident on the user's PC. Backed by British banking giant, NatWest, part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Magex enters the market with over 250 years of banking expertise behind them.

Magex raised US$80 million in its first round equity funding and is currently operating out of offices in London, San Francisco and New York. Major shareholders include Goldman Sachs, Capital Z Financial Services, NatWest (now owned by Royal Bank of Scotland), Universal Music Group, InterTrust Technologies Corporation, Sir Paul McCartney, and Reuters. For more information visit www.magex.com.