Tower Australia Takes on the MAX™ Makeover

Singapore, 27 January 2004 - Equator One Pte Ltd (E1), an emerging leader in infrastructure management solutions, announced that TOWER Australia Limited (TOWER) has selected E1's flagship product, MAX™ Infrastructure Management Suite (MAX), to rev up and strengthen TOWER's computing backbone and networking environment.

TOWER has recently deployed MAX to allow them to intelligently manage and monitor the performance of their enterprise infrastructure--spanning a range of networks, servers, databases, applications and devices--to provide detailed performance analysis and reporting. MAX provides TOWER global views of the adviser networks, allowing TOWER's Services and Technology Department to respond proactively to customers' demands.

Adam Simpson, Services & Technology Manager for Tower Australia Ltd, said that managing their IT infrastructure before MAX was difficult and cumbersome because they had no single view of the enterprise network or network devices. They also had significant fixed overhead in maintaining their systems because of many different and often incompatible network management utilities. What impressed Simpson most about MAX is the ease with which MAX is deployed and used, and the fact no external agents are required to be installed on their servers.

Mr. Simpson praises MAX's affordability, ease of use, multiple-user Web-based access, integrated reports, and its versatile all-in-one solution package. MAX's ease of use and deployment shortens TOWER's service delivery cycle, allowing it to deploy its services quickly and in a cost-effective manner. Mr. Simpson added, "I'm so impressed with MAX that I am now in the process of deploying it into other TOWER companies."

About TOWER Australia

TOWER Australia Limited is an innovative and competitive provider of risk, superannuation and retirement solutions to the Australian market. It is part of the TOWER Group, a diverse financial services organization that operates throughout the South Pacific region. The TOWER Group has evolved over the past 13 years by organic growth and the acquisition in Australia of Adriatic Life Ltd (1990), Friends Provident Life Assurance Company Ltd (1993), the Deferred Annuity and Bond business of Advance Life Insurance Ltd (1997), FAI Life Insurance Society Ltd (1999) and Bridges Financial Services Group Pty Ltd (2000). TOWER aims to deliver information and products to its adviser networks, which helps customers make decisions tailor-fitted for them. It aspires to provide specialist information, products and services that are consistently acknowledged for their quality and customer relevance.

About Equator One

Equator One Pte Ltd (E1) today stands out as an emerging leader in providing IT infrastructure management solutions to enterprises and next-generation service providers, empowering them to optimize the performance and availability of their mission-critical computing infrastructures. E1's comprehensive suite of solutions is based on an open, distributed and scalable architecture, and provides proactive monitoring, measurement and control of IT resources. E1 products also offer service level agreement management, fault management and network performance management of all applications and systems within a network environment. E1 solutions allow customers to simplify management at all points of network congestion, thus reducing the cost of ongoing maintenance, and delivering high returns on investments, as well as lower total cost of ownership. Equator One (www.equatorone.com) is headquartered in Singapore, with liaison offices in Taiwan, the United States and India, and is establishing the US headquarters in San Diego in the near future.