2nd November - LogicaCMG today announces that it has partnered with T-Mobile to bring its Instant Energy service to the UK market. Instant Energy is a new service that revolutionises prepayment metering for gas and electricity customers by removing the need for traditional meter cards and keys. T-Mobile will wirelessly enable the Instant Energy service using its proven and robust network and SMS messaging platform.

Instant Energy is a true machine-to-machine service that will radically transform prepayment metering for suppliers whilst significantly improving the customer experience. The service is enabled by GSM smart meters, developed co-operatively by LogicaCMG and meter manufacturer Iskraemeco, and an innovative mix of hardware, software and communications technology.

By using a GSM communications infrastructure, communication with the meters is real-time on-demand enabling a supplier to control and gather information from the meter as and when required. Instant Energy enables a supplier to read, configure and control the meter without the need for costly site visits. This ground-breaking approach means that prepayment metering will become a more cost effective way of managing customer payment and debt. Instant Energy will streamline business processes for energy suppliers and reduce the cost-to-serve by up to 20 per cent.

A successful pilot has already demonstrated the robustness of the service. The pilot, carried out over six weeks during June and July 2005 encompassed 97 UK locations and saw over 900 SMS messages sent. During the pilot over 97.5 per cent of all read requests were successful on the first attempt and 98 per cent of messages were successfully delivered to the meter in less than 120 seconds.

Instant Energy has already won a British Computing Society IT Professional award for Social Contribution in recognition of the increased flexibility and control it grants consumers, particularly the elderly, students and those unable to secure credit. As well as the SMS credit purchase channel (favoured by 54 percent of participants in the successful pilot), customers can also top-up their gas or electricity via the web, in stores, or via a call centre. In fact the flexibility of the service opens up the available sales channels giving suppliers the ability to tailor tariffs and services to individual customers needs

Rick Hanks, principal consultant, energy and utilities at LogicaCMG UK said: "With Instant Energy, LogicaCMG is taking innovative machine-to-machine technology and applying it for best value in the utilities marketplace. The real-time nature of the product enhances the operational data quality received, providing energy suppliers with the means to monitor and bill accurately, whilst reducing fraud and misdirected payments - a problem that currently costs the industry £150 million in outstanding payments a year."

Simon Ainslie, Director of Business Sales, commented: "T-Mobile's partnership with Logica CMG delivers an innovative service that clearly demonstrates how large business can both reduce their costs and differentiate their service to customers through wireless enablement. We see the energy sector as a key sector for Wireless M2M and this agreement strengthens our performance in this strategically important industry."

LogicaCMG and metering services

• LogicaCMG's meter reading solution, MRS CE, is used by most major metering reading companies in the UK to manually read gas and electricity meters, both prepayment and credit, and to date over 150 million multi-utility, multi supplier read requests have been processed by the product.
  
• LogicaCMG data collection systems process over 75 percent of the UK's meter reading data
  
• LogicaCMG's systems process two out of every three text (SMS) messages sent in the world
• LogicaCMG has successfully deployed more than 150 telecoms payments solutions on five continents, in 2G, 2.5G and 3G worldwide.

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