Aquarion Water Company Selects Impress for GIS to Integrate ESRI and SAP; Packaged integration improves business processes and enhances data integrity.

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Impress Software, a leading provider of packaged integration applications for SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Project Management (EPM) customers, today announced that it has been selected by Aquarion Water Company to integrate its SAP and ESRI systems. Aquarion will implement Impress Software's Impress for GIS, a solution that enables businesses to relate asset information between SAP and ESRI and streamline business processes that span both systems.

Founded in 1857 and headquartered in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Aquarion Water Company is one of the ten largest investor-owned water utilities in the U.S., serving more than 219,400 homes and businesses, or approximately 677,000 people, in 53 surrounding communities. As part of a company-wide transformation spearheaded by its executive team, Aquarion looked to increase the sharing of information across the organization. After an extensive competitive review, Aquarion chose SAP as its master system of record and recognized the need for a tight integration with ESRI ArcGIS.

"As a utility, our mapping system is an important part of our business, and with most of our data being stored in SAP, we needed to find a robust and proven integration solution," said Howard J. Dunn, Vice President of Operations and Technology, Aquarion Water Company. "After evaluating alternatives, we determined that Impress for GIS was the right solution to enable the seamless integration. We expect to recoup our investment in about one year by dramatically lowering operation costs, decreasing service times and increasing overall efficiency."

Aquarion plans to implement both Impress for GIS modules -- Asset Data Management (ADM) and Maintenance and Operations. The ADM module, which relates asset information between systems and continually synchronizes changes, will provide Aquarion with the data accuracy it needs to ensure financial compliance and operational efficiency. To improve productivity of its customer service operation, Aquarion will also implement the Maintenance and Operations module to enable geospatial analysis of work order and asset data and provide access to SAP processes from ESRI's ArcGIS.

Impress for GIS will enable the use of ESRI's ArcGIS as a front end to mySAP ERP, and allow ESRI users at Aquarion to create, modify, manage, and analyze asset data and work orders. Through real-time integration with SAP, Impress for GIS will enable the execution of maintenance operations and facility management directly from the ArcGIS maps while ensuring that functional locations, equipment, work orders, and other geographical data elements are consistent across the systems at all times.

"Spatial asset management is an important initiative for utilities, but in order to realize its true value, they must reliably integrate GIS and ERP systems," said Warren Utt, president and CEO of Impress Software. "We're proud to offer Impress for GIS, a cost effective solution that will help Aquarion achieve its stated mission of efficiently delivering the highest quality utility services to its customers."

About Impress Software

Impress Software is a leading provider of packaged integration applications that enable quick and cost-effective integration of project management and geographical information systems with SAP, resulting in streamlined business processes across multiple enterprise systems. Impress solutions allow integration to be completed at a fraction of the time and cost compared to traditional EAI development platforms. Impress Software customers include global leaders such as Bayer, BP, Halliburton, Rockwell Collins, US Army and Valero.

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