Bangalore, India and East Brunswick, New Jersey, USA – March 19, 2015 – Wipro Ltd.   a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company today announced that it has been selected by the United States-based utility company, Greater Cincinnati Water Works (GCWW) as its IT partner to transform the utility’s CRM, Billing and Service Bureau operations.  Greater Cincinnati Water Works provides about 133 million gallons of water a day to over 1 million people across the states of Ohio and Kentucky in the United States.

Wipro will design, build, host and deploy a Customer Information System (CIS) for Greater Cincinnati Water Works in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.  The company will also maintain the solution for Greater Cincinnati Water Works for a period of five years after the initial implementation. Unlike conventional capex-heavy commercial models, Wipro’s solution is being offered in an Opex-based, pay-per-use pricing model, which is linked to the actual volume of customers served by Greater Cincinnati Water Works.

The Customer Information System solution is based on Oracle’s Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) technology platform. The solution offers leading-edge water industry specific features for Contact Management, Billing, Metering, Account Management and Self-Service capabilities, which will provide an enhanced user experience for Cincinnati Water’s end customers.

Deploying this solution is expected to be 40% more cost-effective than comparable solutions as Wipro’s pre-configured technical accelerators for data integration and data migration from the legacy CIS platform will shorten the implementation timeline as well as reduce the transition risks for Greater Cincinnati Water Works.

In addition, the variabilized, pay-per-use commercial model will enable Greater Cincinnati Water Works to offer CIS services to other small to medium sized Water Utilities in the United States via a ‘Service Bureau’ model, to boost its revenue growth. Technology advances are driving legacy CIS system replacements across the utilities industry. Offering a hosted, pay-per-use CIS solution with a scalable and attractive commercial proposition eliminates the need for small to mid-size water companies to make upfront investments in prohibitively expensive solutions.

Once established, this ‘Service Bureau’ model will offer CIS-as-a-service through a joint go-to-market strategy between Greater Cincinnati Water Works, Wipro and Oracle. The ‘Service Bureau’ will create a strong partnership ecosystem and market presence for Greater Cincinnati Water Works, Wipro and Oracle for offering CRM and Billing managed services to water and wastewater utility companies, in North America.

Gary Wiest, Commercial Services Superintendent, Greater Cincinnati Water Works said “Cincinnati Water is very excited to team up with Wipro for the implementation of the Oracle CC&B solution.  Not only does the service bureau solution align with our strategic business plan, it also allows us to offer a tier 1 solution to utilities that might not have the means to procure the CC&B solution.  We are very excited to be part of an innovative project with Wipro and Oracle that could possibly change the way utilities do business.”

Tony Parrott, Director of Water & Sewers, City of Cincinnati said, “As we move forward, evolving into the utility of the future, we look for innovative ways that can help reduce our costs.  The service bureau strategy is one of the ways in which we can provide an exceptional billing system for our customers and other utilities.  We know our relationship with Wipro and Oracle will help us achieve our goals of providing additional options and outstanding customer service to our customer base.”

Sahadev Singh, Vice President and Global Head – Water Utilities, Wipro Limited said “We are delighted to have been chosen by Cincinnati Water as a strategic partner to transform their customer service business function using a Platform-as-a-service model. This program is the foundation of a strategic relationship enabling Cincinnati Water, Wipro and Oracle to extend the technology platform and deliver game changing Service Bureau offerings to other water utilities in the US.”