BREAKTHROUGH SERVICE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY ATTRACTS INDUSTRY-LEADING VENTURE FUNDING ROUND FOR COMANAGE CORP.Highland Capital, Goldman Sachs Lead $39 Million Round to Support CoManage's Customer-Aware Telecom Service Management SolutionPittsburgh, Pa. -- Oct. 17, 2000 -- CoManage Corporation today announced it has closed a $39 million venture funding round, among the largest ever in the telecommunications Operations Support System (OSS) space. Highland Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs led the funding round, the company's third, with additional investment by current investors, including Adams Capital, Lucent Ventures, Columbia Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. The funding round highlights the breakthrough technology in CoManage's Customer-Aware" service management system for telecom service providers delivering next-generation voice and data services. CoManage's Integrated Service Manager" (ISM) dramatically simplifies and speeds creation and management of services such as DSL, Voice over DSL, IP, ATM and virtual private networks (VPNs). The software system's groundbreaking Customer-Aware technology enables service providers to see and manage individual customer connections for the first time. According to telecom analyst Michael Howard: "This is the first system that closes the gap between what we've traditionally called 'network management' and what we call 'customer relationship management.' CoManage's system gives service providers what they so critically need at this point in time: The ability to be customer-centric, instead of just network-centric." At its launch in June of this year, ISM won the top award for new telecom management software at SUPERCOMM, the largest trade show for next-generation telecom networking technologies. "CoManage's Customer-Aware service management solution is leading the industry trend toward helping service providers enhance their focus on customers," said Martin Mengwall, Principal at Highland Capital. "With its innovative technology and impressive team, CoManage is revolutionizing how telecom and data carriers deliver and manage their offerings, as is evidenced by the company's growing customer base of leading service providers." "CoManage has vision, expertise and drive to address the most critical issues facing next-generation service providers as they seek to fill rising demand for telecom and data services," said John Kiang of Goldman Sachs. "With its industry-leading team, CoManage has launched a solution that is drawing accolades from across the industry for its unique customer-centric focus. The company is positioned to expand on its success and capture a leadership position in the emerging service management market." "We are thrilled to have the support of leading high-tech venture firms like Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital and our current investors," said Dave Nelsen, co-founder and CEO of CoManage. "This capital will help us change the face of service management and enable network service providers to deliver superior services to their end-user customers." CoManage's third round is among the largest ever in the OSS space, which includes network management systems, element managers and accompanying support products focused on network operations. The round brings CoManage's total funding to $60 million. Founded in 1998, CoManage has recruited a world-class team to its Pittsburgh-based headquarters from technology industry giants such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lycos, Microsoft, Nortel and Marconi. CoManage's award-winning product, ISM, has been selected by leading telecom and data carriers to support advanced service offerings. ISM is the industry's first product to combine four key network management functions -- discovery, provisioning, fault management and performance monitoring -- into a single software application. The system then creates Customer-Awareness by embedding information about customers and services into these functions. This breakthrough yields unprecedented end-to-end control and visibility of customer services. In addition, service providers can use the Customer-Aware system to offer their customers self-provisioning and self-monitoring capabilities. ISM's innovations make completely new things possible. For example, with CoManage's system, a service provider can look at how network operation is affecting all connections and services for any given customer, effectively gaining the customer's perspective on network performance. In addition, a service provider can now monitor the utilization of all customer connections in their network, proactively informing individual customers when they need to purchase more bandwidth. Or a service provider can sell customized service level agreements (SLAs) to individual customers and automatically monitor performance for each unique agreement, without special hardware. With these important new capabilities, ISM enables service providers to increase revenue, reduce operations costs and dramatically improve customer satisfaction.
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