Gates Corporation Adopts HP Adaptive Enterprise Strategy to Support Rapid Global Expansion; Multi-million dollar HP pay-per-use solution replaces legacy systems

Business Wire, May 6, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ENSA@WORK Conference

MUNICH, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 2004

HP (NYSE: HPQ)(Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced that the Gates Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of London-based global engineering group Tomkins plc (NYSE:TKS), has selected HP for a multi-million dollar pay-per-use investment in HP hardware, software services and maintenance support.

Employing the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, Gates will be able to execute business decisions more quickly, broadly and easily to satisfy the growing needs of its business units as the company expands its operations.

Gates, a leading worldwide supplier of automotive and industrial power transmission belts, hoses and connectors, has selected HP for the migration and storage implementation services needed to replace legacy systems and will consolidate and virtualize on HP Superdome servers in its new data center in Denver.

Industry standards-based HP technology will run Gates business-critical applications, such as manufacturing and customer order management, and help the company extend its leadership in non-tire rubber products to all major markets across the globe. Gates' HP Superdome-based environment will provide virtual support for business operations within the United States, Mexico and Canada, producing a simple and standardized IT environment that is both cost-effective and more responsive to change.

The IT consolidation initiative, based on the HP 9000 Superdome server and HP-UX 11i operating system, will run a full suite of upgraded Oracle(R) enterprise applications at the Denver headquarters to support all of Gates' operations in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

In line with the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, Gates anticipates better performance, increased agility, risk mitigation and a reduction of IT costs by eliminating technology redundancies and decreasing support and maintenance. Additionally, HP virtualization technology will enable the company to pool and share IT resources so utilization is optimized and supply automatically meets business demands in real time.

"We've seen a substantial performance improvement utilizing the HP platform along with the flexibility and adaptability we need to respond quickly to business needs within our industry," said Joseph Heasley, chief information officer, Gates Corporation. "Changes in our business can be addressed in a more timely manner, enabling us to respond to business events, scaling to capacity as needed, and improving our overall business operations to keep pace with business expansion."

The data center is composed of two high-end UNIX(R) HP Superdome servers, an HP StorageWorks storage area network, 300 industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and HP OpenView management software. HP Services is providing critical systems support.

By consolidating and virtualizing with HP Superdome systems, multiple applications can run in multiple partitions on a single, easy-to-manage server environment. This optimized environment provides flexible processing power to meet demands as needed. The HP Superdome systems also can be easily upgraded by installing more powerful central processing units to meet Gates' needs for rapid scalability.

The backbone of the storage area network is an HP StorageWorks EVA5000 disk array - a high-capacity storage cabinet that contains more than 100 disk drives providing 20 terabytes of available storage for allocating the supply of IT resources to meet demand. The virtualization capabilities of the EVA5000 technology will allow Gates to react to changing storage requirements much quicker than in the past by handling peak loads as needed.

To help increase administrator efficiencies and reduce the cost of managed storage, HP OpenView Storage Area Manager software simplifies and automates the management of Gates' storage resources and infrastructure. The software helps Gates to effectively monitor, manage, optimize and plan storage service availability, performance, usage, cost and growth. It also enables management and planning for capacity related to Gates' Oracle environment.

About Gates Corporation

Gates Corporation is one of the world's largest manufacturers of automotive and industrial products, systems and components. Today, Gates has sales and marketing operations in every major industrial and automotive market, including North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. Gates is part of the Industrial and Automotive Group of Tomkins plc, headquartered in London. Tomkins is a publicly traded company (FTSE and NYSE) with 40,000 employees worldwide.

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 last four fiscal quarters, HP revenue totaled $74.7 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, Calif.