Press Release

Azul Compute Appliances Help Rapidly Growing Web 2.0 Company Meet Service Levels While Reducing Infrastructure Costs by 70 Percent

Mountain View, Calif. – October 9, 2006 – Azul Systems, the award-winning leader of enterprise server appliances that deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service, today announced that Blue Chip Expert, an online marketplace for hiring managers, is using the Azul Compute Appliance to cost-effectively build its Web 2.0-based business by reducing the amount of hardware required to ensure service levels, even during periods of unpredictable demand.

Based on the technologies and techniques of social networking, Blue Chip Expert is an invitation-only, “viral” marketplace where hiring managers can easily find and hire the highest caliber experts, specialists, and professionals for contract work. Members of the service enjoy the benefits of precise matching, personal service, and the extended reach of many professional circles. If the company relied solely on conventional hardware, rapid growth would require more and more servers at ever spiraling costs. With the shared services model and smaller footprint that Azul enables, Blue Chip Expert is reducing its overall server infrastructure costs by as much as 70 percent. In addition, with a shared pool of compute and memory resources, Azul Compute Appliances eliminate the expensive practice of over-provisioning servers to meet unpredictable website traffic.

“As we analyzed anticipated throughput and the hardware required to maintain service levels, it became clear that the high cost of deploying more and more conventional servers would constrain our ability to grow the business,” said Scott Langmack, founder and chief executive officer of Blue Chip Expert. “Azul has enabled us to continue to grow rapidly but with a far more reliable, manageable, and cost-effective infrastructure that enables us to respond more quickly to changing market forces and customer demands.”

Optimized for the Java™ platform, Azul Compute Appliances eliminate the need for prolonged application tuning and capacity planning at the application level. As a result, Blue Chip Expert is able to more quickly respond to market forces through dynamic provisioning of resources as new services are rolled out. Additionally, Azul appliances reduce complexity by allowing a single instance of an application to handle greater throughput, and reduce the number of application instances that need to be deployed and maintained. And with its larger, pauseless memory heaps, the Azul Compute Appliance allows Blue Chip Expert to store its entire database in memory, lowering database hardware costs and dramatically improving responsiveness.

“Web 2.0 businesses are flourishing and as a result are demanding extreme scalability of their Java-based applications in a way that ensures reliable, predictable service levels without the huge costs of a conventional approach to hardware,” said Stephen DeWitt, chief executive officer at Azul Systems. “As Blue Chip Expert has discovered, the simplicity of Azul’s Compute Appliance plugged into their network has enabled a massively scalable and highly reliable infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional server platforms.”

About Blue Chip Expert
Blue Chip Expert is an efficient marketplace where hiring managers can easily find and hire the highest caliber experts, specialists, and professionals for contract-based work. Blue Chip Expert uses the combined power of the Internet and people to solve the massive challenge of creating an efficient market for talent. For more information visit www.bluechipexpert.com.

About Azul Systems
Azul Systems is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that delivers compute and memory resources as a shared network service for transaction-intensive applications, such as those built on the Java™ platform. Our family of Azul Compute Appliances enables transparent, massively scalable infrastructure that supports the business priorities of today’s most demanding enterprise environments and delivers increased capabilities, capacity and utilization at a fraction of the cost of traditional computing models. More information on Azul Systems can be found at www.azulsystems.com.

Legal Notices
Azul Systems and Azul are registered trademarks, and the Azul arch logo is a trademark of Azul Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All Java based trademarks and their logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.

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