Press Release

Azul Systems Compute Appliances Help BT Handle a 600 Percent Increase In Transaction Volume, Meeting Compliance Needs and Delivering Equal Access to UK Service Providers

Mountain View, Calif. – November 29, 2007 – As the telecommunications industry grows, it is critical for carriers that their business partners and suppliers can access and exchange information online on a level playing field. End-users want to conveniently test, provision, repair and bill for services. The heavy online traffic has resulted in businesses finding it harder to service the growing end-user needs with the already existing IT infrastructure. To keep itself flexible, addressing the server scalability and throughput demands, BT found the answer in Azul Systems.

In January 2006, BT established its Openreach business gateways to provide transparent and equal access and services to all of Britain’s communications providers using the local access network. Openreach’s formation was one of the most significant milestones in the history of the UK’s telecommunications industry, ensuring a healthy competitive market for consumers.

To meet Openreach’s goal of providing all of its customers – wholesale, retail and third parties – guaranteed service levels for response times and transaction volumes, BT had to think outside of the box, as it realized it needed a different approach to the challenge of server scalability.

“Despite a significant investment in hardware, our IT infrastructure wasn’t sufficiently scalable, which meant we couldn’t ensure consistent service levels on a sufficiently large scale without encroaching on the data center,” said Mark O’Flaherty, B2B and integration program manager, BT Design.

BT reached out to Silicon Valley’s Azul Systems and leveraged Azul’s Compute Appliances to deliver the massive scalability required to run the Openreach Gateway. The Appliances yielded significantly improved performance and increased capacity without compromising hardware redundancy and failover safeguards. BT has already experienced the following business benefits delivered by Azul Systems:

• Significant reduction in hardware data, management, power and cooling costs.
• Improved response time: Reduced the highly variable response times from up to 10 seconds to consistently below two seconds, regardless of transaction volumes.
• Enhanced scalability: Enabled gateways to handle a 600 percent increase in transaction volumes on existing server infrastructure.
• Reduced infrastructure: Lessened the requirement from 10 Sun servers per gateway to two.
• Lower power consumption: Reduced by 59 percent.
• Smaller datacenter space: Reduced from 20 racks to six.
• Lower total cost of ownership: Reduced by 30 percent.
• Ability to meet stringent service levels and deregulation requirements as mandated by Ofcoms.

“Our quality-of-service challenge reflects an increasingly important industry trend – scalability and throughput demands of mission-critical compute infrastructures are outpacing the capabilities of traditional servers,” said Colin Windsor, CIO, Openreach. “With Azul Compute Appliances, companies facing capacity challenges can achieve the scalability they need while controlling IT costs through greater manageability, flexibility and reduced requirements for real estate and power.”

To learn more details about the BT project supported by Azul Systems, you can download a complete copy of the case study, “ Openreach Thinks Outside the Box: A Case Study Based on Axway Synchrony Gateway Solution.“

About Azul Systems
Azul Systems is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service to transaction-intensive applications, such as those built on the Java™ platform. Azul Compute Appliances enable transparent, massively scalable infrastructure to support the business priorities of today’s most demanding enterprise environments and deliver 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.

About Openreach
Openreach is responsible for the nationwide local BT network, which connects homes and businesses across Britain to communications providers’ networks. Openreach provides communications providers with services and products associated with that network.

About BT
BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Its principal activities include networked IT services; local, national and international telecommunications services; higher-value broadband and Internet products and services; and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

In the year ended 31 March 2007, BT Group plc’s revenue was £20,223 million, with profit before taxation of £2,484 million.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.

For more information, visit www.bt.com/aboutbt.

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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