Opening of Proposals - Utility Billing System - Systems & Software, Inc. - Part 1

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(7) describe the software licensing model; Our software license is based on an internal algorithm that factors in the number of accounts, the number of services, the expected number of users, and other smaller factors. The license costs provided with this response are based on the provided number of accounts and number of users. Any significant changes to those may require different licensing costs. Expected annual growth is accounted for in our maintenance costs, (8) describe the schedule of software Upgrades and provide a current rioadmap for the proposed solution; There are two types of upgrades to enQuesta, detailed! below. We have numerous plans for the next few versions of our software, and a Product Roadmap is included with this response, as Appendix A. Maintenance Releases: There releases occur approximately quarterly and generally provide small product updates and bug fixes, if necessary. Any enhancements or changes are generally minor and relatively simple to test. We make these releases available to our customer's Train/Test environments at their discretion, where the new solution will then be tested and approved for release (on a schedule set by the customer) to Production. The cost of these releases is covered under the maintenance contract. Major Releases: Major releases of enQuesta provide significant improvements to existing functionality or entirely new functionality. Major releases are available approximately every two to three years. There is never a new license fee for these upgrades (it's all covered under the original enQuesta license) but there will be some professional services required for the installation and configuration of the new solution. The typical upgrade process takes between three and six months, depending on the size and complexity of the utility. (9) describe the proposed integration approach;; We built enQuesta utilizing a service -oriented architecture (SOA) in order to better facilitate communication between the system and all of the ancillary systems from other vendors that it has to communicate with. The end result of this extensibility and "loose coupling" of functionality creates an application that can be adapted rapidly to changing business requirements and market demands. The following table describes the enabling SOA technologies and standards employed within enQuesta to ensure iinteroperability, We currently have over 30 developed APIs for various integrations with our solution, and are, continuously developing more to make integrations with a wide variety of systems as simple as possible. Below is a sample of our four most commonly used APIs: 20