University of Melbourne Student "Masters the Mainframe"

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that University of Melbourne Student Dharvinder Bassi has been named Australia's "Master of the Mainframe" student contest winner after out-performing more than 450 other students across Australia. In addition to becoming Australia's Mainframe student contest winner, Bassi now joins the growing list of approximately 50,000 worldwide students with mainframe computing training. This burgeoning group of future mainframe experts is a direct result of the ongoing resurgence of the mainframe, which continues to serve as a centralized, secure powerful transaction engine for all of the world's top 50 banks and multinational organizations.

Made up of three stages of increasingly complex programming tasks on the mainframe platform, the contest provides a unique opportunity for students to experience the mainframe environment. They do this by remotely logging into an IBM mainframe -- a common situation they may face in their future workplace.

"Originally we anticipated 200 students participating in 'Master the Mainframe,' however we ended up having more than 450 students sign up for the event," said Glenn Wightwick, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of IBM's Australia Development Laboratory.

"This demonstrates the continued interest in mainframe computing, particularly in an IT environment where there is a lot of pressure to consolidate and reduce space. The mainframe is a great platform in terms of scale, performance and energy efficiency."

"I took part in this contest because it provided me with a challenge," said Bassi, who is studying a Masters degree in Information Systems. "I liked Part 3 of the contest as it involved lots of different technologies and things that can be done using IBM mainframes such as issuing UNIX commands, executing JAVA classes, etc. which were totally new to me. I really enjoyed it!"

Wally Smith, Information Systems Course Co-ordinator at the University of Melbourne, added, "Dharvinder entered the competition on his own initiative. We are delighted as this shows the calibre of students with technical skills in our program."

The University of Melbourne is one of over 400 worldwide universities that have partnered with IBM to teach mainframe and large systems skills. For more information about IBM's Academic Initiative for Mainframe and schools teaching mainframes, visit http://www.ibm.com/university/systemz

For more information on IBM Australia, visit www.ibm.com/au

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Contact Patrick Garson IBM Australia/New Zealand Phone: 02 9462 5015 Email: pgarson@au1.ibm.com Mylissa Tsai Systems Technology Group, IBM Phone: (914) 766-4294 Email: tsaim@us.ibm.com