[March 15, 2012]

Vertex Business Services Announces Release of eCIS+ Version 3

Vertex Business Services today announced the availability of eCIS+ Version 3.0, the company's next generation customer information system (CIS). This versatile platform is well suited for municipal and investor-owned electric, gas, water, and wastewater utility companies in North America.

Derived from Vertex's (News - Alert) highly successful E-CIS platform, eCIS+ has a unique, browser-based interface design that is grounded in real-life usability studies of utility customer service representatives (CSRs), and thousands of hours of analysis around call types, user behaviors and Web best practices. The result is a highly interactive desktop application that is designed to achieve optimum business performance and empower CSRs.

eCIS+ shifts the burden from the user to the system with streamlined, guided processes for the highest volume call types, along with robust safeguards for accurate data input on every call. Reduced training time, faster call handling on the floor, increased customer and user satisfaction, and higher accuracy of customer records all add up to operational savings and lower costs for today's resource-constrained utility.

• Improved Revenue Management
  eCIS+ improves back-office operations by streamlining the meter reading to usage calculation to billing processes.

• Efficient Exception Handling
  
  Bills are flagged for review based on the utility's specific criteria, such as a change in usage pattern or dollar variance. eCIS+ provides billing technicians with tools to complete the reviews in a timely manner, focusing on accounts with exceptions.

• Enforced Business Rules
  A key to data integrity within eCIS+ is the ability to enforce business rules during data entry. A visual editing tool empowers technical business analysts to maintain business rules, eliminating the need for a programmer to make these changes.

• Ease of Integration with External Systems
  eCIS+ is open, agile, and extensible following a service oriented architecture (SOA). The eCIS+ architecture allows for rapid integration with external systems leveraging APIs and out of the box interfaces.

• Scalable Architecture
  The eCIS+ server architecture is based on the massively scalable IBM (News - Alert) Power Systems POWER7 series of machines. While typical eCIS+ installations only require a 1-2 processor configuration with a Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) rating of 6,000, this architecture is capable of scaling up to 16 processors with a CPW rating of 98,000 CPW.

• Roadmap for Utilities' Future Needs and Emerging Trends
  Greater competition and emerging trends such as smart metering, demand response, and energy efficiency will place unprecedented new demands on CIS platforms. With eCIS+, utilities benefit from a state-of-the-art architecture and clearly defined development roadmap.

"It's our goal to work closely with our clients to provide solutions that create stronger relationships with customers and improve efficiencies," said Dan Sullivan, managing director for Vertex Business Services. "eCIS+ Version 3 provides utilities with an exceptional platform that not only improves efficiencies, but also enables them to cost-effectively keep pace with a dynamically changing market."

To learn how Vertex is cost-effectively addressing utilities' customer care and billing needs, visit www.vertexgroup.com.

About Vertex: Vertex employs 11,000 people on four continents across 70 locations, delivering solutions to a wide range of clients 24/7 and supporting over 50 million consumers. In North America, there are more than 1,700 dedicated professionals based in 19 Centers of Excellence serving more than 23 million consumers for 50 electric, gas and water clients. A recognized leader in customer management services, Vertex provides a wide range of transformational service solutions to deliver successful outcomes for clients in the areas of BPO and customer management outsourcing, IT applications and services, consulting and transformation, and decision sciences.

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