Business Service Management Solution Launched by Digital Fuel for Managing Service Costs and Billing.

Expands Business Service Management Leadership in IT, Business Process, and Telecommunications Beyond Its Widely Used SLA Management Solution

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Digital Fuel, the leader in Business Service Management, today announced that it has launched its ServiceFlow(TM) Cost Management solution for Business Service Management in IT, Business Process and Telecommunications. It extends the company's leadership in SLA Management for Service Providers and Enterprises, both corporate and government, to now utilize ServiceFlow Cost Management for increased customer satisfaction, reduced cost to serve, and managing service costs to ensure financial targets are met.

Business Service Management Capabilities

ServiceFlow Cost Management is a Business Service Management software application that automates service cost management processes that are important to successful service relationships including service catalogs, operational service budgets, service cost structure management, pricing management, and consumption-based billing. Specifically, ServiceFlow Cost Management delivers a wide range of new cost-controlling capabilities to service providers and enterprises including the following:

* Offer and manage flexible service price plans;

* Calculate and allocate cost by specific services and customers;

* Manage service costs and margins across all services and customers;

* Manage actual service costs compared to the budget for all services and customers;

* Enable corporate and government customers to Chargeback Service Costs to their business customers (i.e. business units, government agencies) cost centers based on actual consumption rules;

* Enable corporate and government Customers to Manage Actual Service Costs to the appropriate service budgets; and

* Streamline Service Budget preparation and ongoing financial management to maintain service cost performance within budget.

Applying Technology to Specific Industry-Focused Issues

"ServiceFlow Cost Management is a valuable addition to SLA management," said Dan Twing, Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates. "Service providers, corporations and governments benefit from a collaborative solution to manage service costs more effectively. Service agreements for IT, business process, and enterprise telecommunications would achieve greater success if these service relationships had the ability to accurately charge-back service costs to corporate business units or government agencies in a manner that reflected their actual consumption."

ServiceFlow Cost Management is a natural extension of Digital Fuel's market leading solution for managing performance to the contractual and business obligations in Service Level Agreements, called ServiceFlow SLA Management. Together, these business applications deliver a comprehensive solution for business service management in IT, business process, and telecommunications.

Manage the Billing and Quality of Services Delivered to Each Customer

"We selected Digital Fuel to become an important component of managing our IT and business process outsourcing agreements for increased customer satisfaction," said Jimmy Jimenez, director of business intelligence at Siemens Business Services. "ServiceFlow helps us manage the quality of services delivered to each customer. It gives us early insight into the customer's consumption and delivery performance which is valuable for fast effective decision-making. The solution will enable us to deliver service billing to delight our customers with service consumption detail helpful in their clear understanding of services consumed across their business."

More Effective Means for Service Chargeback

Increasingly, service providers need to respond to demands from customers seeking greater visibility into service costs along with more effective means for service cost allocation ("chargeback"). ServiceFlow Cost Management enables service providers to satisfy this customer need with an automated approach. Service providers and enterprises using ServiceFlow can offer valuable new capabilities for consumption based billing ("chargeback") to the customer business units or government agencies consuming the services. It becomes a powerful tool for aligning services with business value. With more granular, valuable insight into service usage, the consuming organizations become more accountable for their service consumption and the business value delivered.

"In many of today's hypercompetitive service delivery markets, delivering quality services while lowering cost to serve is an ongoing challenge," said Yisrael Dancziger, President and CEO of Digital Fuel. "A critical component to the success of service relationships is the ability to effectively manage service costs. We designed ServiceFlow Cost Management specifically to address this challenge. I am encouraged with how well our solution helps service providers and enterprises proactively manage service quality, keep costs within budget, and leverage their know-how in standardized service offerings for profitable customer satisfaction."

About Digital Fuel

Digital Fuel is the leading provider of business service management (BSM) software solutions, helping service providers and enterprise service organizations manage the performance, financial, and regulatory aspects of IT, telecommunications, and business process services. Digital Fuel has the largest deployments for SLA management and service cost management in the world, with thousands of concurrent users, SLAs, KPIs, metrics, cost formulas, and pricing rules. With Digital Fuel's patented visual approach, our customers are deployed rapidly to quickly drive business value from automating the management of service offerings, agreements, service cost, and performance with their service customers and vendors. ServiceFlow manages billions in business and IT services at companies and governments around the world such as Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Cummins, Capgemini, BT, IBM, SITA, Siemens Business Services, O2, Atos Origin, Telefonica, Transport of London, CSC and many others. Digital Fuel is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices across North America and Europe. Learn more at http://www.digitalfuel.com.