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Lodestar
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PEABODY, MA., March 23, 2000 -(BUSINESS WIRE) -Over the past year and a half, Shell Energy Services Company (SESCo) based in Houston, TX has been providing its retail energy services to residential, small commercial and small industrial accounts. Already SESCo is a leading gas marketer in Georgia with over 300,000 customers. The company needed a better Customer Information System (CIS) that will allow it to provide excellent customer service, and expand quickly from market to Market -- each of which poses a different set of rate setting and billing requirements, and therefore calls for a different configuration of back office capabilities.

to meet this challenge, SESCo has selected LODESTAR as its CIS business partner and the LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite for Retail Companies™ as its new state-of-the-art CIS solution. The new product is an extension of LODESTAR's premier product family, LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite -- the first and most widely used family of commercial CIS products for the energy services industry. Early players in the deregulated market, such as PG&E Energy Services and Select Energy (both operating in the first states to be deregulated, including California), have already used this solution for over two years across multiple jurisdictions to produce the complex bills for their key commercial and industrial customers.

"We were looking for a CIS partner with depth in both experience and technology," states Alan Raymond, SESCo President. "We view this partnership as a critical part of our strategy to rapidly establish a presence in the retail energy services space." Chris Hamilos, LODESTAR's President & CEO added, "Our experience tells us that SESCo is a leader regarding what it takes to be a successful retail energy services provider; and we are particularly excited to be the key provider of software to enable SESCo's strategy."

LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite for Retail Companies™ adds exciting new retail-specific functionality to the existing Customer Choice Suite in areas such as customer acquisition & enrollment, pricing & profitability analysis, load forecasting, settlement verification, billing, financial management and collections. Other functional areas include customer relationship management, customer care, energy consumption analysis, and marketing & sales.

"After completing an exhaustive review and due diligence of CIS providers for the deregulated marketplace, Shell Energy Services Company selected LODESTAR over all other companies," states Mark Fuller, Director of Customer Care. "We believe that LODESTAR's team offers SESCo the most cost-effective and lowest risk option for us to become the leading national energy marketer. They demonstrated again and again that they are committed to our success, and value us as not just a client, but as a business partner. We are very excited about working with the LODESTAR team."

Besides unmatched breadth of features, best-in-class functionality and superior performance, LODESTAR also provides key architectural elements in a component-based architecture that allow retail energy services marketers to Move quickly and successfully throughout the deregulated environment. Among those elements: a metadata driven environment, a plug-&-play message-based interface, and a powerful and unique Rules Language. LODESTAR, for example, uses XML extensively while avoiding proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) as the means to interconnect its own product modules as well as to interconnect those modules with front office applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Finally, LODESTAR is fully committed to open industry standards while maintaining it's technology edge.

This means that retail marketers can move easily from jurisdiction to jurisdiction without limits to their choice of providers for services they may choose to outsource such as customer service call centers. There are many CRM, financial, energy trading & risk management and other systems with which retail marketers may have to interface, and the LODESTAR solution is designed to let a Retail Company select the best of them for their solution. SESCo's initial CRM solution is from Siebel.

As for the LODESTAR Rules Language, it allows business analysts to configure the LODESTAR software without the help of programmers -- and without actually reprogramming the software itself. Business rules, pricing and settlement algorithms, and billing procedures can therefore easily be accommodated in different markets without the need to create multiple versions of the software. The end result is a flexible software solution that is easily adapted by business analysts to new requirements.

States SESCo's Chief Information Officer, Tim Byers: "It is clear that LODESTAR's technology, architecture, and engineering team is truly best-in-class. Our technical staff evaluated the LODESTAR solution and found it to be superior to others considered. We feel confident that we have looked at all possible alternatives in the marketplace today, and we are certain we have made the right choice to Lead us into the future of a deregulated energy market. More importantly, with over 100 clients throughout the US and Canada, LODESTAR has the experience to understand our business and our needs like no other company we looked at. For example, LODESTAR's application was clearly the best in terms of its ability to integrate with Siebel's CRM solution as well as other existing SESCo software components."

The LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite for Retail Companies supports the following business functions:

• Customer Acquisition & Enrollment
• Product & Service Definition
• Load Profiling, Pricing & Profitability Analysis
• Billing & Electronic Bill Presentment
• Settlement Verification
• Financial Management
• Customer Care

Founded in 1978, LODESTAR is a leading provider of enterprise application software to enable customer choice in the energy industry. LODESTAR Corporation is located at 8 Essex Center Drive, Peabody, Massachusetts 01960-2911. For more information regarding LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite, visit www.lodestarcorp.com

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