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ORCOM

BEND, OR. January 23, 2001 - Orcom Solutions, the leading Application Service Provider (ASP) for customer care and billing solutions to the utility industry, today announced Hack Heyward as its new President. Heyward comes to Orcom from GE, where he served as a business unit leader for GE Global eXchange Services. He started his career at the Southern Company, the nation’s largest investor-owned utility, where he held a variety of leadership posts at three of its subsidiaries.

Steven Price, CEO of LiveWire Corporation, which has owned Orcom since early 2000, commented, “We are delighted to have someone with Hack’s utility industry experience, extensive operations background, and successful track record enabling utility deregulation as Orcom’s new leader.”

Heyward brings to Orcom 22 years experience in the utility and information technology industries. He joined GE Global eXchange Services in late 1995 to build a utilities industry practice for that electronic commerce unit of GE. Under his leadership, GE Global eXchange Services became the utilities industry market leader for business-to-business electronic commerce, focusing on deregulation at the retail level by managing the flow of data between energy marketers and utility distribution companies in order to Support customer billing.

His varied utility background includes engineering, operations, IT and contracting responsibilities with Southern Company Services, Southern Electric International, and Georgia Power. While with Southern Company Services, Heyward led a major cross-company, interdisciplinary IT development effort to replace several of the utility’s procurement and disbursements accounting systems. While with Georgia Power, he successfully implemented Total Quality Management, Nuclear QA programs and several major benchmarking projects. This focus on quality has recently been enhanced by his successful use of GE’s Six Sigma methodology.

In explaining what attracted him to Orcom, Heyward said, "While at GE helping clients through the difficulties of retail deregulation, especially with billing problems, I became painfully aware of how few vendors in the space can actually execute against their promises and market hype. Orcom stands out with a multitude of satisfied clients, a huge lead over its competitors in the ASP customer service model, and never having had a failed implementation.”

Heyward is a registered professional engineer and holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

About Orcom Solutions
Orcom Solutions, Inc., is the premier Application Service Provider (ASP) of billing and customer care solutions, systems integration and outsourcing services to the utility and energy industry. With more 1.6 million outsourced bills, Orcom is the largest ASP for utility and energy bills in the industry. Headquartered in Bend, Oregon, with an office in Denver, Colorado, and a service delivery facility in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, Orcom currently has approximately 500 employees. Orcom is a LiveWire Utilities company. LiveWire is a diversified software and Internet company focused on business-to-business and mission critical software and products and services for media, telecom, utility and Internet companies.

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