Press Releases : 2006

Oblicore Achieves Record Growth in 2005 

Oblicore Bolsters Market Leadership -- New Executives and Breakthrough Product Offering Drive International Expansion and Growing Global Customer Base

COLUMBIA, Md., January 9, 2006 - Oblicore, Inc., a leading provider of Service Level Management software and best practices, today announced record-breaking results for 2005, with annual revenue growing over 60 percent. During the year, Oblicore added over a dozen new customers, expanded its leadership team, released Oblicore Guarantee 3.0, the third-generation release of its flagship application, and gained significant momentum in Europe, Asia and the United States.

“2005 was a banner year for Oblicore, with the company achieving record sales and gaining more blue-chip corporations as customers,” said Jack Freker, CEO of Oblicore. “Businesses around the world are increasingly focused on achieving just-right levels of service delivery. In growing numbers, they’re turning to Oblicore for software and services that streamline the time-consuming and complex tasks of monitoring, managing and reporting on IT-powered services – helping them reduce costs and consistently meet their most important service obligations.”

In 2005, the company continued to boast a100% customer retention rate, indicating a high level of customer satisfaction. Customer adoption of Oblicore Guarantee grew substantially:

• Over a dozen enterprises and service providers became Oblicore customers, including Amadeus, Lufthansa, and Proximus.
• Over two dozen existing Oblicore customers expanded their initial deployments, including Belgacom, British Telecom, T-Systems and ING.
• Over 75% of Oblicore’s customers from more than 10 countries attended the company’s second-annual user conference, ObliVision 2005, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October.
• Oblicore now counts many of the world’s largest companies as customers, including four of the top 10 telecommunications providers, two of the 10 largest IT service providers and top utility, credit card, insurance, software and financial services companies.

In 2005, Oblicore introduced Oblicore Guarantee 3.0, a ground-breaking Service Level Management application. Guarantee 3.0 enables mainstream businesses worldwide to more effectively monitor, manage and report on the performance of the services they receive from outsourcers and those they provide to both internal and external customers. With Guarantee, companies can more easily define services and their inherent rules, automatically manage up to thousands of SLAs or service commitments and utilize sophisticated predictive capabilities to identify the cause of service problems before they impact performance. 

The market drivers responsible for the growing interest in and adoption of Oblicore Guarantee include the rising demand for IT and business process outsourcing, increasing reliance on service level agreements (SLAs) and related service obligations, and the growing use of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) as a service management framework. Noting these trends, Gartner analysts named Oblicore a “Cool Vendor” in an April 2005 report titled, “Cool Vendors in IT Service Portfolio Management and IT Service Dependency Mapping, 2005.”

In 2005, Oblicore Guarantee was also recognized for its ability to support service level management initiatives by the independent analyst firm Yphise. Based on its ISO 9001-certified assessment, Oblicore Guarantee was granted an ITIL certification for IT Service Level Management, based on an assessment of more than 300 functional and technical evaluation criteria.

To address the challenges that come with rapid growth and to ensure its future success, Oblicore enhanced its management team in 2005 with the following industry leaders:

• Jack Freker, former president of the Customer Management Group at Convergys, joined Oblicore as president and CEO in October.
• Kevin Carr, former vice president of Sales for Candle Corporation, joined Oblicore as vice president of sales for the Americas in October.
• Frank Moss, former chairman and CEO of Tivoli Systems, became chairman of Oblicore’s advisory board in June.

Oblicore also expanded its operations into new geographies in 2005, opening new offices in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Rome.

About Oblicore

Oblicore is a leading provider of Service Level Management software leveraging field-proven best practices in SLM, BSM and Sourcing Management. The company’s flagship product, Oblicore Guarantee, is leveraged by dozens of blue chip customers around the world, ensuring critical IT-powered business processes are delivered in a manner that is compliant and predictable—reducing costs, improving operational performance and increasing shareholder value. Both service providers and enterprises alike rely on Oblicore’s business-focused, top-down approach to maintain compliance with SLAs, to increase customer retention and acquisition, and to keep critical business processes running smoothly. Headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, with offices across the US, Europe and Israel, Oblicore is backed by a strong, global investor base. For more information, please visit www.oblicore.com.