Convergys' Geneva Software's Distributed Revenue Processing Delivers Tier 1 Operators Advanced Scalability Plus Reduced Cost of Ownership.

Business Editors

CINCINNATI & CAMBRIDGE, UK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 19, 2001

Convergys Corporation (NYSE:CVG), the global leader in billing and customer care services, today announced details of Geneva (TM) Distributed Revenue Processing (DRP), a configuration option which optimizes performance of its award-winning Geneva Active Revenue Management software in a distributed, multi-machine environment. Key benefits of Geneva DRP include cost-efficient scalability for rating very large volumes of events and enhanced system availability. Benchmark tests indicate significant performance gains and considerable cost savings using DRP.

The introduction of next-generation services is widely expected to increase the volume of billable events approximately tenfold. The processing load will be further increased by the requirement to rate many of these new services in real time, for example, where m-commerce transactions are involved. Geneva DRP allows many instances of Geneva's active rating engine to be distributed efficiently on a cluster of affordable machines, separate from the main database. It contains enhancements that optimize rating performance in a multi-machine environment, along with the operational environment to support the central management of a multi-machine configuration of the Geneva software. Geneva DRP has also been designed to increase system availability. Rating processes can be run on a number of different machines, with load balancing to diminish the impact of hardware malfunction in any one of the rating servers.

Tier 1 operators currently processing post-paid events such as voice, SMS and VAS using Geneva's existing Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) architecture on a single server will be able to utilize more cost-effective multi-server hardware configurations. New benchmarks carried out in conjunction with Sun Microsystems and running on Sun Fire(TM) 6800 midrange servers achieved the performance needed to process peak-demand real-time rating for new-generation services. For instance, a UMTS operator with 7 million subscribers, each generating an average of 24 billable events per day, could comfortably handle peak-hour demand by rating over 6,000 real-time events per second on a server cluster separate from the main database running on a 12CPU E6800.

According to Stephen Thomas, Managing Director of Convergys EMEA, the benchmarks tested the entire Geneva rating process. "Many rating benchmarks test only a part of the rating process, typically just event pricing. We believe that what is relevant to operators is the performance of the whole rating process, encompassing event import, event guiding to the customer account, tariff resolution, pricing, real-time unbilled usage update to the customer account and optimized event record storage ready for billing."

In addition to providing advanced scalability, Geneva DRP enables operators to implement extremely cost-effective hardware upgrades. Because the price per CPU is higher in large machines than in small ones, a cluster of small machines is typically less expensive than a single large machine with equivalent rating performance. Furthermore, with rating processes running on separate machines from the main database, the database machine can be smaller, with correspondingly lower database license costs. For example, a mobile operator with 7 million subscribers that upgraded its systems to cope with the additional volume processing demands of 3G services could save approximately $1 million on hardware and $500,000 on database license costs by implementing Geneva DRP in a multi-machine configuration.

Convergys will be releasing the Geneva version 5.0 DRP option in January 2002.

About Convergys

Convergys Corporation (NYSE:CVG), a member of the S&P 500 and the Forbes' Platinum 400, is the global leader in integrated billing and customer care services provided through outsourcing or licensing. We serve top companies in telecommunications, Internet, cable and broadband services, technology, financial services, and other industries in more than 30 countries. We also provide integrated, outsourced, human resource services to leading companies across a broad range of industries.

We bring together world-class resources, software, and expertise to help create valuable relationships between our clients and their customers. This commitment is validated by the more than 1.3 million individual bills our software produces each day to support more than 100 million subscribers, and by the more than 1.2 million separate customer contacts we manage each day, both live and via electronic interaction.

Convergys (TM) employs nearly 44,000 people in 46 customer contact centers and in our data centers and other offices in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Israel, and Europe. Convergys is on the net at www.convergys.com, and has world headquarters in Cincinnati.

(Convergys, the Convergys logo, and Geneva are trademarks of Convergys Corporation.)

Convergys EMEA is located in Cambourne Business Park, Cambourne, Cambridge, CB3 6DN, UK. In addition to its five offices in the UK, Convergys has European offices in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Previous news releases and other information about Convergys can be viewed on our Web sites: www.convergys.com and www.genevatechnology.com