"It is the backbone of customer service. By joining these market-leading product lines, teams, and customer bases together, SPL will provide utilities around the world with a greatly expanded menu of opportunities to improve service at a lower cost." John Blend CEO of CES remarked, "Customer and outage systems have long been the two key enablers of effective real-time service delivery for utilities, and this move by SPL will create a first-to-market, integrated approach. CES believes that our customers, partners, employees – and the market at large – will be very well served by this acquisition."

Existing and new CorDaptix customers will be offered the opportunity to pre-integrate their CIS and outage management functions, expanding customer services and speeding the resolution of grid problems. "We have been offering individual modules of our
CorDaptix solution for some time," said Debes, "primarily to help customers bolster the performance of legacy systems while they prepare for an eventual complete CIS overhaul. The Centricity and Netricity products will become additional offerings."

"The efficiencies inherent in pre-integrated OMS and CIS just makes sense," says Debes. "It's an issue of cost. Utilities are facing massive demands both to expand their systems and to make them more reliable. At the same time, customers—both regulated and
deregulated—seek increased choices. The global utility market is moving toward competition. Regulators are implementing performance-based rates and similar forms of stepped-up accountability. Security issues abound. There is simply no way for a utility to handle each separate development with a new piece of software."

The analyst community has pointed to the long-term benefits of the acquisition. Warren Causey, president and CEO of Warren B. Causey, Ltd., Atlanta, comments, "In the post- 2001 U.S. utility market, some vendor consolidation is inevitable. Utilities have virtually
stopped major software projects, at least for the short term. Instead, they currently are demanding customized, incremental solutions to pressing problems. The vendors that can offer both that piecemeal approach for the short term, as well as an expanded footprint for
the future, when utilities inevitably begin to look again at replacing aging systems with next-generation solutions, will be successful. The SPL-CES combination appears to generate exactly the type of synergies that will enable SPL to serve utilities' needs now
and in the future. Both companies have shown the ability to adapt and innovate and combining forces – laying the groundwork now for the solutions that will be needed then – makes good business sense."


About CES International
CES International supplies real-time software solutions to distribution utilities serving more than 35 million metered accounts on five continents. CES International is the developer of Centricity, the operations resource management (ORM) suite that includes
the market’s leading outage-management system, and the newly developed Energy Delivery Management (EDM) suite of network-management software. CES was established in 1990 and is based in Atlanta, Georgia, with development headquarters in
Minneapolis, Minnesota and Asia Pacific headquarters in Brisbane, Australia.



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