Automation of ServerManagement Lifecycle Enables Nation’s Largest Futures Exchange to RapidlyRespond to Business Demands While Reducing Costs

Bedford, MA – January 26, 2004 – BladeLogic Inc., the number one provider of data center automation software, today announced that Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc., the largest futures exchange in the U.S., has selected BladeLogic Operations Manager to efficiently manage its enterprise data center operations. As a global marketplace, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) handles an average of nearly 2.6 million trades per day, supported by a highly sophisticated data center environment with thousands of servers. After a thorough assessment of available solutions, CME selected BladeLogic as its data center automation platform to automate the lifecycle of managing server and application infrastructure. CME expects that the use of BladeLogic will enable greater IT responsiveness to the business and significant improvements in operational efficiency.

“To support several hundred million transactions per year, application availability and IT responsiveness are critical to CME’s business,” said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, BladeLogic. “We are delighted that CME has selected BladeLogic Operations Manager to efficiently manage its enterprise data center operations.”

BladeLogic Operations Manager enables IT organizations to efficiently and securely provision and configure their UNIX, Linux and Windows servers and automate all ongoing changes required for application release management, patch management, and configuration repair. Furthermore, BladeLogic Operations Manager enables IT managers to proactively measure compliance to security and configuration policies and automatically correct discrepancies in order to maintain configuration consistency in the data center. By providing the ability to effect large scale provisioning and change while ensuring compliance to policies, Operations Manager allows organizations to implement "Coherency" - which enables any change, across any platform, with any skillTM - to address today's key data center management challenges while offering a tangible roadmap to a utility computing environment.

About Chicago Mercantile Exchange
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (www.cme.com) is the largest futures exchange in the United States. As an international marketplace, CME brings together buyers and sellers on its trading floors and GLOBEX® electronic trading platform. CME offers futures and options on futures primarily in four product areas: interest rates, stock indexes, foreign exchange and commodities. The exchange moved about $1.5 billion per day in settlement payments in the first nine months of 2003 and managed $34.1 billion in collateral deposits at Nov. 30, 2003. CME is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. (NYSE: CME), which is part of the Russell 1000® Index. Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CME and GLOBEX are registered trademarks of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc.

About BladeLogic
BladeLogic is the number one provider of data center automation software with a large installed base of Fortune 500 and other leading customers including General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Priceline, Sprint, SunGard, Qwest, VeriSign, Walmart.com and WebEx. BladeLogic Operations ManagerTM enables any change, across any platform, with any skill - allowing companies to efficiently provision, configure, and manage today's complex application infrastructure with a proven return on investment in 3-6 months. BladeLogic is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.bladelogic.com.