News release

FIRST TRUST CORPORATION ADDS INTEL®ITANIUM® 2-BASED HP INTEGRITY SERVERS FOR ONLINE TRANSACTIONS

First Trust Corporation, one of the nation's largest independent trust companies for self-directed retirement accounts, has moved its transaction processing computing infrastructure to Intel® Itanium® 2-based HP Integrity servers running Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* AS 2.1 and Oracle* 9i Real Application Clusters. The new HP Integrity rx2600 solution required fewer processors and delivered a threefold performance increase over a previous RISC-based system running proprietary operating software.

"The HP Integrity server with the Intel Itanium 2 processor provided us with substantial cost advantages and a cutting-edge, high-performing transaction processing system that helps First Trust offer increased customer service and helps give us a competitive advantage," said Jeff Knight, vice president of technology and vendor relations at First Trust. "Moving to the Itanium architecture running Linux also allows us to standardize our IT infrastructure on a common platform that substantially reduces our IT costs and provides us the flexibility and scalability we need as our business grows."

First Trust sought an easily scalable transaction processing solution for its mutual fund and equity businesses, which have a growing client base performing millions of dollars of transactions daily. Other critical requirements included reliability and quick failover capabilities to maintain online connections for customers.

First Trust is moving away from expensive proprietary operating systems to take advantage of the price, performance, security and cost savings of HP industry standard, Intel architecture-based platforms running Linux. First Trust took advantage of consulting provided by HP Services and Intel Solution Services for design, optimization and testing before deploying the systems. First Trust is also looking at additional technology deployments to reflect real-time computing benefits and faster access to information via wireless devices.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. For the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2003, HP revenue totaled $73.1 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

About Intel

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.

Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.