LAS VEGAS — xwave, a longtime Cognos® partner, has expanded its business intelligence (BI) portfolio with recently-implemented solutions for organizations in energy, government, and telecommunications. The business solutions provider is showcasing its capabilities at Cognos Forum, a four-day event attended by partners and clients from around the world.

xwave has 30 years of integration expertise and operates a BI practice that serves clients across eastern Canada and New England. The firm has a solid track record designing, delivering and managing Cognos data-warehousing solutions, with 50 consultants who offer significant domain expertise.

“Business Intelligence continues to prove itself a transformational enabler in terms of its ability to make corporate information meaningful and accelerate core business processes,” said Howard Sherman, Director, Business Intelligence, xwave. “Often our clients begin to see the benefits of these solutions before implementation is even complete. Our partnership with Cognos plays an important role in these successes and in our ability to provide both comprehensive product knowledge and the assurance of ongoing support.”

For New Brunswick Power, a publicly-operated energy provider, xwave built and integrated a solution using the Cognos 8.3 suite. NB Power, serving hundreds of thousands of customers in Canada and the U.S., was looking to automate its systems for tracking data such as Key Performance Indicator (KPI) values. The underlying business processes supporting the tracking were sound, but required considerable manual intervention and culling from disparate data sources. Now, using the new technology, NB Power can:

• access data and metrics readily and securely from a central web server
• deliver organizational metrics to its entire group of companies — for example: see a single view of a metric or KPI value across the entire organization
• complete processes in minutes that, once manual, took days to complete

For Maine Revenue Services, which administers the state’s tax laws and collects revenues, xwave’s solution was created using the Cognos 7 suite. Maine Revenue Services had been relying on largely manual methods of processing, analyzing and publishing tax-related information. Of particular concern was the processing of sales-tax data, which was time-consuming and required significant manual cross-referencing of data before its public release. With the new solution Maine Revenue Services can:

• quickly identify previous errors in source-system entry and investigate questionable information
• release information as soon as it’s available and printed, confident it will be appropriate for public consumption
• resolve questions and locate information quickly and professionally (rather than spend days looking for it)

For Aliant, one of North America’s largest and longest-serving communications providers, xwave used Cognos 7 components to design and integrate a billing solution that enables Aliant’s 250 largest enterprise customers to access and analyze their billing data online. Customers had expressed a collective need for more efficient, flexible billing processes that would enable users to analyze and organize data according to individual business requirements. With the new solution:

• customers can analyze billing data online as well as download it to their own networks where they can further assess and report on it using customized account dimensions
• Aliant can access and view information the same way it’s viewed by customers
• users have full-featured functionality (multi-dimensional cubes; parameter-driven reports) in two languages (English and French)

xwave is one of more than 60 firms exhibiting at Cognos Forum, which takes place May 12th – 15th at the Venetian Resort and Hotel in Las Vegas. For event details visit http://www.cognos.com/cognosforum/

About xwave
xwave, a division of Bell Aliant, is a full-service business-solutions provider that serves clients through systems integration, infrastructure services, and advanced technology solutions. These areas offer clients a broad delivery capability: xwave plans, designs, builds and operates complete information and communications technology (ICT) solutions that meet business-process needs and are designed to deliver a measurable return on technology investments. With almost $300 million in revenues and 1,500 people, xwave is one of the largest business-solutions organizations in Canada, with locations in St. John’s, Halifax, Moncton, Saint John, Fredericton, Charlottetown, Summerside, Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto, and New England. More information can be found at http://www.xwave.com/

For further information, contact:
Karen.Ewing@xwave.com
877-332-4605