2011 Customer & Partner Innovation Awards

Innovation Award: Cox Communications

Company Overview:
As the third largest cable and broadband company in the U.S., Cox has about 6 million customers and more than 22,000 employees. Cox is also the nation's third-largest cable television provider. The company's vision is to be the most trusted provider of communication and entertainment services in America. Cox Enterprises is the parent company for the Atlanta-based media company Cox Communications®.

Business Challenge:
For years, Cox was challenged with the logistical process of determining serviceability for a prospective customer. In most cases, Cox sales representatives were unable sell inbound customers on the first call because it was difficult and time consuming to understand how close that customer was to the Cox network, the project's build costs and the rate of return. Cox lost potential revenue as it took weeks to perform estimates in some markets.

Solution/Innovation:
Cox built a new enterprise-class Geospatial Enterprise Mapping System (GEMS), a cost-effective, user-friendly, Web-based application, using webMethods. GEMS merges prospect, customer and network data into a single, easy-to-use, spatially enabled mapping application. As a result, Cox can quickly estimate commercial build costs and rate(s) of return. Cox can determine a prospect's serviceability without a physical site visit.

Business Results:
Rather than taking up to 14 days to return a serviceability request, customers are now electronically evaluated in seconds or minutes. By reducing the need to physically inspect every premise in the survey process, Cox Business is able to both install and recognize revenue faster while lowering its carbon footprint. Cox expects $2 million per year in enterprise-wide savings and $10 million savings over five years

Technology Benefits:
webMethods CAF, a component of webMethods BPMS, enabled Cox Communication to codelessly create the GEMS interface using "drag and drop" Web 2.0 features, such as the interactive maps. Using webMethods Integration Server, GEMS communicates with any other system at Cox. webMethods Broker provides the high-performance backbone for messaging between apps so that Cox can execute real-time, message-oriented interactions in an event-driven architecture. webMethods Adapters enabled Cox to speed up the project by achieving integration basically "out of the box."

Why Software AG?
The original decision to use Software AG technology was based on overall cost of ownership and the simple fact that the environment is very robust and scalable. The relationship between Cox and Software AG has grown into one of a partnership that is moving the boundaries of technology together. Software AG had applied some of its best experts to help implement GEMS and other innovative business-changing projects.

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