For Immediate Release:

Lastminute.com Achieves Over 400 Percent Performance Increase and Slashes
Response Time with WARP’s Application Acceleration Technology

LONDON (October 7, 2003) – WARP Technology Holdings, Inc. (OTC BB: WRPT), a leading provider of network and application acceleration technology solutions, today announced that through its partner Estafet, lastminute.com the largest travel site in Europe, has selected the WARP 2063e edge appliance to dramatically improve the performance of its travel and leisure Web site. As a result, lastminute.com slashed its average response time from 14 seconds to less than four seconds, providing over a 400 percent performance increase, a 40 percent decrease on infrastructure requirements, and a significant competitive advantage over other travel sites that can still average 10-plus seconds for a response. In addition lastminute.com has noticed that the speed of its site has increased revenue streams from dial up modem customers accessing the site in the evening from home.

Lastminute.com was named the 2002 “Best Travel Site” by Web User Magazine, the UK’s best selling Internet magazine and is ranked as the leading online travel agency in Europe, according to a PhoCusWright survey conducted in April 2003. The company and Web site was launched in the UK in October 1998, providing a broad range of travel services. Using the Internet to match suppliers and consumers at short notice, lastminute.com works with a range of companies in the travel, entertainment and gift industries, and is dedicated to bringing its customers attractive products and services. The company has over 7 million subscribers globally, with over 250,000 unique sessions per day and over 1 million page views per day.

To keep pace with growth, lastminute.com deployed two WARP 2063e edge appliances and two WARP 2063e edge nodes, which serve 100% of the traffic for all 40 of its Web sites located across 14 countries. This implementation supports an average of 50 requests per second across the appliances and maintains an average CPU utilization between 20% and 30%. WARP’s technology is enabling lastminute.com to improve the online customer experience, process transactions faster, save on infrastructure costs, and increase revenues, while providing a scalable solution to accommodate growth.

“We viewed it as critical to enhance the performance of our award-winning site without incurring the additional infrastructure technology costs and complexities amidst our constant and rapid growth,” commented Luther Garcia, Manager of Global E-Commerce Architecture for lastminute.com. “By deploying the WARP 2063e solution, we have significantly improved our response times to a rate well below our competitors and can easily manage the incredible spikes in demand we receive during our peak business periods. Plus, as we continue to grow, we can easily add WARP 2063e units to scale our operations with minimal cost.”

Adrian Wright, Estafet's Sales Director, said, "We have worked hard with lastminute.com to achieve a dramatic performance improvement and a reduction in application server load but the added bonus of finding a new revenue stream from customers during the evenings while they are home using dial up conections makes for a fantastic ROI. This is a great example of how Estafet’s expertise and experience of caching can be of immediate benefit to large dynamic Web sites.”

“Lastminute.com’s implementation of the WARP 2063e provides them with a unique solution that combines a broad collection of application acceleration technologies to support their e-commerce and travel operations – all in one appliance,” commented Greg Parker, WARP’s CTO. “When organizations are challenged with network and application performance issues, our WARP 2063e appliance provides a cost-effective solution to address this need.”

Designed for enterprise organizations and service providers, the WARP 2063e edge appliance provides a non-intrusive solution that sits at the network’s edge to off-load high-volume traffic, and serve end-user requests from the closest node resource. A sister product of the WARP 2063 application pre-processor, the WARP 2063e is typically installed in-front of the Web server farm. It intelligently intercepts HTTP requests to serve repeat requests for dynamic content. Application server resources are only used when the content is brought to the WARP 2063e for the first time or has to be refreshed. This application acceleration strategy limits the processing capacity consumption of both the application server software and the database server, eliminating unnecessary database retrievals and content generation. Additionally, the WARP 2063e can be used to keep dynamic content requests off wide area networks, such as frame relay, which is particularly beneficial where bandwidth is constrained or expensive.

About lastminute.com

Lastminute.com is one of Europe's leading online retailers offering lifestyle products. Based on the idea of matching supply and demand, it offers consumers last minute opportunities to acquire airline tickets, hotel rooms, package holidays, entertainment tickets, restaurant reservations and home delivery, specialty services, gifts and auctions. Operating across multiple markets, lastminute.com has established approximately 15,300 supplier relationships and over 7.5 million subscribers. Llastminute.com also owns and operates online brands holidayautos.com, travelprice.com, Degriftour.com, travelselect.com, travel4less.co.uk and, eXhilaration.co.uk and has a stake in LCC24.com the online vehicle for Lufthansa City Center in Germany.

About Estafet

Estafet is a Caching and Messaging (JMS, SMS) company providing solutions that make its customers easier to do business with. It enhances the user experience for major Web sites through its Caching solutions for the Dynamic Content of sophisticated & complex Internet & Intranet Applications, and it enables interactive corporate SMS conversations between Companies, their customers & employees. For further information please visit our website www.estafet.com or call us on +44 (0)20 8973 2080.