HP and WeDo Consulting establish alliance in Latin America

Lisbon, Portugal, May 3, 2004 -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) and WeDo Consulting today announced an alliance that will provide both fixed and mobile operators with a set of solutions designed to improve Telco’s financing positions by strengthening the areas of handsets subsidization fraud analysis, revenue leakage detection, roaming and collections management, dealers incentives and customer knowledge.

“With the softening of the market in the last years, many operators invested behind new services that did not provide the appropriate return on investment. Now they realize that, just by improving internal processes / business support systems, they can obtain very significant financial returns, at low investments levels”, says Claudio Rangel, Industry Manager – Telecommunications for HP Latin America.

The set of solutions complement HP´s FMS (Fraud Management System) platform, the worldwide leader present in over 60 operators and 175 million subscribers. They include:

• RAID - Revenue Assurance Integrity Driller, an end-to-end revenue assurance solution that detects and reduces incoherencies along the revenue chain, such as lost or incomplete customer records, and errors in the files exchanged between systems, thus providing up to 10% of operator revenues lost in the revenue chain;
• RMS – Roaming Management Solution, a dedicated billing and CRM system for Roaming Services that allows the integrated management of the entire Roaming process, reducing manual labour, time-to-market of new roaming agreements and dependency on clearing houses;
• CMS - Commissioning Management System, a innovative and flexible solution to manage indirect and direct sales commissioning of dealers that allows a faster and precise relationship with a vital part of mobile operators´ value chain;
• ICS - Integrated Collections Solution, a complete, independent and highly integrated solution to manage and automate credit control and collection operations, proven effective in reducing customer defaults;
• SACS - Subsidization Analysis and Control System, an efficient solution for an effective fraud control with terminal subsidization, a problem that hits particularly GSM operators in emerging countries
• CKS – Customer Knowledge Solution offers Telecom operators the ability to have a complete and unified view of the customer base, while providing valuable information on key aspects of the telecom business: network usage, products and services profitability, impact of equipments subsidization. It presents an end-to-end approach to a Business Intelligence implementation, covering the entire information gathering, warehousing and delivery process within a Telecom Operator.

“WeDo Consulting is a very successful company, having helped many operators such as Vodafone, Orange, Amena, Novis/France Telecom, Oi GSM, Telemar and Brasil Telecom improve their financial bottom line via our set of solutions. By joining forces with HP´s set of products and services, we see a bright future ahead with Latin American Operators”, said João Faísca, Sales & Marketing Director, WeDo Consulting

HP and WeDo have already been together in events such as the 3GSM World Congress 2004, and will be presenting their set of solutions at the Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management in Telecom Conference in the Hyatt Regency Miami, June 2-4.

About HP

HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its acquisition of Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

About WeDo Consulting

WeDo Consulting is a leading provider of software solutions and services for the communications & media markets in Europe and Latin America. With an international presence, WeDo Consulting is an ISO9001: 2000 certified organization, and a member of the GSM Association, as a provider of Billing applications and systems. We have developed a software product portfolio that addresses specific needs of telecom operators, including incentives management, business intelligence, revenue assurance, collections, and roaming and new channels. WeDo consulting can be found on the World Wide Web at www.wedoconsulting.com

Telemar selects Revenue Assurance Software from WeDo Consulting

Rio de Janeiro, 12th July 2004 – WeDo Consulting, a leading provider of software solutions for the communications & media markets, today announced the closing of a deal to implement its Revenue Assurance solution (RAID) with Telemar. Part of the TNL Group, Telemar is the largest fixed operator in Brazil and one of the major in Latin America with 16 Million subscribers.

Telemar decided to start an aggressive Revenue Assurance program based on the implementation of WeDo Consulting’s software product, RAID, meaning an important step towards automation.

RAID will allow the integration and automation of all Revenue Assurance control processes.

RAID is WeDo Consulting's answer to the need felt by telecommunications operators in maintaining the coherency between their entire BSS, OSS and network systems portfolio, thus controlling revenue leakage.

"Revenue Assurance is a very important area for Telemar and this project is a major milestone in our improvement initiatives. We already saw at Oi’s that having the right combination of systems, processes and people taking care of revenue assurance prevents significant losses of gross revenue. The use of RAID as a highly configurable dedicated tool means that we can integrate our controls to assure data consistency in the operational platforms and also monitor the revenue streams in a automated way, thus empowering our Team to consistently deliver added-value to our business," said Paulo Gonçalves, Vice-President of Telemar.

Rui Paiva, CEO of WeDo Consulting added, "RAID positions WeDo Consulting as one of the leading companies in the Revenue Assurance arena. This selection of RAID confirms the confidence of our customers in the solution as it delivered important results and presented extremely ability to cope with complex business and technological environments"

The momentum that RAID is building and its strong customer references worldwide, wireline and wireless, make this the leading solution for Revenue Assurance. RAID is continuing to gather the telecom operators’ preference and confidence. WeDo Consulting is committed to RAID’s excellence assuring this to be the most complete, flexible and effective revenue assurance tool available in the marketplace.

About RAID
The RAID solution permits the definition and implementation of the Revenue Assurance processes most adequate to each technological infrastructure and business requirements allowing for Revenue Assurance teams to save effort on usually time-consuming task and to dedicate all resources to the performing root cause analysis.

RAID is an important tool for any telecom operator worldwide that wishes to prevent revenue loss due to data inconsistencies between their different systems – network components, operational systems and business support systems.

RAID is a modular solution:

• The Platform Integrity Assurance Module performs automatic verification of subscriber data consistency between different OSS and BSS platforms. This RAID module validates discrepancies through a process of comparison across systems, such as Switches, Billing and CRM systems, and generates divergence reports and alarms.
• The Revenue Flow Control Module audits the revenue chain, from event generation to the integration of these records in invoices sent to subscribers. This module monitors the exchange of information between the different systems of the revenue chain, identifying possible failures or deviations, which could lead to revenue loss, as is often the case.
• The Events Control module is used to monitor the event processing chain, by tracking a sample of events, individually, from CDR generation in the switching centrals and/or service platforms to their inclusion in the invoices sent to subscribers. It also measures the performance of the flow of these events contributing for determining levels of service. This module is highly complementary to standard Test Call Generators.
  

About Telemar
Telemar, part of the TNL Group is the major telecommunications company in Brazil in terms of gross revenues and number of installed lines. With large experience in fixed, local and long distance, communications Telemar’s counts today with more than 16 million active lines.

About WeDo Consulting
WeDo Consulting is a leading provider of software solutions and services for the communications & media markets. With an international presence, WeDo Consulting is an ISO9001: 2000 certified organization, and a member of the GSM Association, as a provider of Billing applications and systems. WeDo consulting can be found on the World Wide Web at www.wedoconsulting.com

Optimus wins The Data Warehousing Institute 2004 Best Practices Awards
WeDo Consulting delivers the winning solution in the category of “Delivering a 360-degree View of Customers”

Lisbon, Portugal, July, 5th 2004 - WeDo Consulting, a provider of software solutions for the global telecommunications market, announces that its customer Optimus won the Data Warehousing Institute 2004 Best Practices Award in the category of “Delivering a 360-degree view of customers”. WeDo Consulting has been distinguished as a solution sponsor for the Optimus project.

Optimus has deployed WeDo Consulting’s Business Intelligence Framework – CKS (Customer Knowledge Solution) back in 1998, at the time of launch, to cope with following business requirements:

• Provide a single source of information to the entire organization, enabling a 360 degree view of customers
• Avoid redundancies and inconsistencies of data
• Set a common understanding of business concepts and rules
• Meet the different information needs of different end-users (Marketing, Planning and Control, Top Management, Sales, Engineering, Customer area, Fraud, etc…) with reliable, relevant and timely business information.

Since its initial deployment the solution has been continuously evolving to support the growing needs of end-users. Currently the data warehousing environment supports a set of business applications, namely churn prediction, customer value management, executive information system, credit scoring and ABC analysis.

“It is with great enthusiasm that Optimus receives this award. During the course of the project Optimus and WeDo Consulting had to overcome several challenges, such as synchronizing the integration of several data sources without affecting the operational performance, maintaining large volumes of historical data, getting the involvement of the end-users, and enabling non-technical teams to perform complex business analysis. This award is the recognition that we have succeeded” says Carlos Jorge, Optimus, Information Systems Director.
“I believe the Optimus data warehouse implementation constitutes a best practice because its deployment has always had in mind the needs of the end-users and the results achieved have truly enabled a 360º view of customer related data. Furthermore, almost 100% of the initial requirements were covered and the project has been continuously evolving to cope with new needs that arose with business growth and maturity”, states WeDo Consulting’s Partner José Lourenço.

About CKS (Customer Knowledge Solution)
Implemented at the most innovative providers in Europe and Latin America, CKS provides a world class business intelligence framework specifically designed to meet the needs of the Telecom business. CKS covers the complete information cycle - from collection, to storage and exploration – that is relevant for the decision making process. Its modular and scalable architecture integrates several information domains: Customer, Traffic, Supply Chain, Financials and Churn, which complement each other to allow for a unique and integrated vision of the customer and its value.

About WeDo Consulting

WeDo Consulting is a leading provider of software solutions and services for the communications & media markets in Europe and Latin America. With an international presence, WeDo Consulting is an ISO9001: 2000 certified organization, and a member of the GSM Association, as a provider of Billing applications and systems. WeDo consulting can be found on the World Wide Web at www.wedoconsulting.com

About The Data Warehousing Institute

The Data Warehousing Institute™(TDWI), a division of 101communications, is the premier provider of in-depth, high quality education and training in the data warehousing and business intelligence industry. TDWI is dedicated to educating business and information technology professionals about the strategies, techniques, and tools required to successfully design, build, and maintain data warehousing implementations, and also to the advancement of data warehousing research, knowledge transfer, and the professional development of its Members. TDWI sponsors and promotes a worldwide membership program, annual educational conferences, regional educational seminars, onsite courses, solution provider partnerships, awards programs for best practices in data warehousing and innovative technologies, resourceful publications, an in-depth research program, and a comprehensive Web site.

To request more information, please contact customerservices@wedoconsulting.com