CGI-AMS, the wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. (TSX: GIB.SV.A; NYSE: GIB), today announced the release of Tapestry® 6.0 a major upgrade of its modular solution for convergent rating, billing and enterprise order management. Tapestry meets the diverse needs of today's retail, wholesale, and government telecom service providers allowing clients to achieve high customer satisfaction while simultaneously controlling costs and supporting new solutions and services. As telecom providers continually broaden their offerings and specialized packages, Tapestry provides essential capabilities to support growth in an effective and efficient way.
"Communications providers are aggressively introducing new 'quadruple play' services including voice, data, video, and content to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and drive market share. They need to deliver these services quickly with focused, cost-effective improvements in their OSS/BSS environments," said Nazzic Turner, senior vice president of CGI-AMS. "Our new Adjunct Rater offering enables providers to deploy a flexible and extremely powerful rating engine which supports both traditional and next generation XoIP services while preserving existing mediation and billing solutions."
"Tapestry is a proven asset to leverage. CGI-AMS has the opportunity to use Tapestry as a key point of expansion in the wireless and convergent communications market," Paul Hughes, director of Billing and Payment Applications Strategies of the Yankee Group.
Tapestry 6.0 includes four major new features:
- Tapestry Adjunct Rater - introduces this new stand-alone offering which leverages Tapestry's existing world class bundling, rating, pricing, and discounting capabilities with exciting new features to achieve faster time to market for new value-added products and 'quadruple play' services. It also includes a streamlined method to test and launch price changes for increased data integrity and simplifies the execution of large scale rate changes.
- "Lifecycle-Linked Pricing" - provides a unique combination of robust promotional capabilities with flexible application based on customer "lifecycle events". This enables innovative pricing and promotions strategies to reduce churn and reward retention (e.g. anniversary discounts, specialized pricing for services retained or upgraded, etc.). These new pricing capabilities are available both as part of the overall billing suite and the Adjunct Rater offering.
- Financial Management - improves revenue assurance by providing support for user defined accrual cycles and real-time posting of adjustments to financial systems along with thorough audit reports for all Tapestry processes.
- Order Management - improves graphical manipulation of workflows and alarms in Tapestry Service Manager, allowing users to quickly identify and remedy tasks thus improving order flow-through and quote-to-cash intervals.
In addition to these major upgrades, Tapestry 6.0 includes a variety of additional enhancements to improve overall operations and reduce the total cost of ownership including dynamic load balancing across Tapestry processes, database support for Oracle 10G and proven linear scalability on the latest UltraSparc IV servers.
Nazzic Turner concludes: "CGI-AMS remains committed to the evolution of Tapestry. We have mapped out a clear vision that is aligned with market direction and client needs and have an aggressive strategy in place to continue expansion of Tapestry's modular capabilities."
About Tapestry
Tapestry is a state-of-the-art rating, billing, and order management solution suite to support convergent solutions and enterprise order management. Installed and proven in Europe and North America, Tapestry meets the demands of the retail, wholesale, and complex business markets. Tapestry has been IPDR certified since 2002. &Nbsp;Tapestry is a registered trademark and is covered by the following U.S. patents: 6,456,986, 6,415,259, 6,240,422, 6,410,098, 6,463,439 and 6,415,298. For more information on Tapestry, please visit www.cgi.com.
About CGI-AMS
CGI-AMS is the wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest independent information technology and business process services firms in North America. CGI and its affiliated companies employ approximately 25,000 professionals. CGI provides end-to-end IT and business process services to clients worldwide from offices in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific as well as from centers of excellence in Canada, the US, Europe and India. CGI's annualized revenue run-rate is currently CDN$3.8 billion (US$3.2 billion) and at September 30, 2004, CGI's order backlog was CDN$13.0 billion (US$10.8 billion). CGI's shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.SV.A) and the NYSE (GIB) and are included in the S&P/TSX Composite Index as well as the S&P/TSX Capped Information Technology and MidCap Indices. Website: www.cgi.com.
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For more information:
Business development
Keith Pigue, executive consultant,
CGI-AMS
(205) 403-8426
Media relations
Angela Morris, communications director,
CGI-AMS
(703) 227-4294
