TORONTO, ON, May 2, 2008 – BMO Financial Group received international recognition this week for its impressive achievements in energy reductions at its Scarborough Computing Centre (SCC), when it was awarded the Uptime Institute 2008 Green Enterprise IT Award for IT Hardware Asset Utilization.

The third annual Uptime Institute Symposium, held in Orlando, Florida, was focused on tackling strategic and operational hurdles and on developing industry benchmarks for improving energy efficiency in data centres. This year’s awards serve as a tribute to organizations dedicated to energy-efficiency improvements in their data centre operations. BMO was among several companies that earned recognition at the event, including AOL, UPS and Nationwide Mutual Insurance.

The award BMO received recognizes the success of a cross-business team from the bank’s Technology and Operations division in reducing power consumption and improving energy efficiency in the data centre. Specifically, the team managed to save a total of 526 kilowatts of power through the elimination of 409 servers, 40 peripheral devices and two storage subsystems.

These impressive reductions were achieved one year after BMO implemented organizational restructuring in its Corporate Real Estate and Enterprise Infrastructure roles and responsibilities to remedy large energy consumption in its core data centres that surfaced in 2004. Initially, it was hoped that the reductions would be accomplished within a three year period.

“I am delighted that our teams were able to collaborate so effectively and so quickly to reduce energy consumption and our environmental footprint,” says Michael Thornburrow, Senior Vice President, Corporate Real Estate and Procurement & Strategic Sourcing, BMO Financial Group. “Quite frankly, the energy reduction is tremendous – the net impact of these reductions is equivalent to the amount of power it takes to run about 430 average sized homes for one year. I look forward to us building on the SCC success story and cutting our energy consumption in other data centres and in other businesses across the company."

About Uptime Institute
The Uptime Institute (uptimeinstitute.org) is an independent services provider that supplies owners and operators of enterprise data centres with leading independent research, corporate advisories, knowledge exchanges, and education and professional services. Its primary area of expertise is the ‘uptime’ availability, reliability, and resiliency of enterprise computing within formal critical computing environments.