Webjet To Double Site Processing Capacity

Webjet today announced that it has concluded a four month technical engineering, strategic and commercial analysis project for the doubling of its internet site traffic and processing capacity.

Commenting, Webjet Managing Director, David Clarke, said:

"We have entered into an agreement with Macquarie Telecom for a three year period, extending further our commercial relationship. Over the next six months leading up to the end of this calendar year, we will be completing the installation of an entirely new server facility at Macquarie Telecom, operating under a server virtualisation architecture, which will see an approximate doubling of our site processing capacity.

The new processing environment, comprising four, high end, Hewlett Packard Proliant Quad Dual Core processor servers with associated SAN storage, will operate under the server virtualisation system, VMWare Infrastructure Enterprise.

Apart from the doubling of processing capacity, the virtual server environment will provide for greater flexibility, redundancy and dynamic server allocation as our business requirements change over the next three years. The existing server equipment, comprising some 16 servers will, at the completion of the project, be reallocated to other internal Webjet business requirements.

This state of the art upgrade will allow, in addition, for the introduction of major new site software, including our online packaging project and a significant new project to add to Webjet's customer experience, to be announced shortly.

We have selected Macquarie Telecom, who has worked with us almost from inception, due to their outstanding customer service capabilities and commitment to the ongoing provision of leading edge technical server management and its state of the art facilities.

Webjet has already successfully completed the conversion of its entire operating environment to .Net2, in consultation with Readify and Microsoft, as a prelude to a range of customer initiatives to be released progressively between now and Christmas.

These significant steps will also provide us with a compression of technology operating costs, whilst at the same time, doubling processing capacity.

We expect the entire project to be completed by Christmas 2006 and as part of Webjet's capital expenditure program and capital management strategy, will see Webjet acquire outright ownership of its entire server equipment.

The financial impact will be to effectively double capacity, at no greater operating cost, than was the case in 05/06. The total of capital expenditure in the project will be less than $300,000."