Avineon Awarded Contract with City of Richmond, Virginia to Support Enterprise GIS Initiative for Public Utilities

Alexandria, Va. - April 2, 2007 - Avineon, Inc., a successful provider of IT, engineering, geospatial and program management services, today announced the city of Richmond, Virginia's Department of Public Utilities (DPU) has awarded the company a contract to perform geographic information system (GIS) data conversion of its gas, water, wastewater and street lighting systems. As a key effort of the enterprise geographic information systems initiative, the DPU data conversion project will enable the city to continue to provide efficient and responsive utilities service to businesses and residences in Richmond and the surrounding counties of Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover.

The DPU provides a variety of utility services directly to Richmond residents. As one of the largest water producers in Virginia, Richmond serves approximately 61,000 individual customers and three wholesale customers.  Its wastewater treatment plant, the largest in Virginia, serves nearly 60,000 customers. The DPU is the eighth largest municipally-owned natural gas utility in the country, with more than 1,700 miles of gas mains and more than 100,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers. Richmond's Street Light utility operates and maintains more than 37,000 streetlights and the city's streetlight electric distribution system. These large-scale services rely extensively on geospatial data that currently resides in disparate hard copy and digital formats.

Eddie Childers, GIS conversion project manager from the city of Richmond DPU, stated, "Avineon's extensive experience converting and migrating data into a number of different GIS systems will allow us to consolidate data across various utilities, enabling spatial data to be better visualized, analyzed and maintained by the city. In turn, this will allow us to continue to provide the best service possible to our utility customers."

The DPU data conversion project will result in an integrated geodatabase utilizing ESRI's ArcGIS. In addition to data conversion and clearing the existing work order backlog, the project will require development of data models for each utility, a data maintenance application and an application to generate a hard copy product similar to the city's existing map book series from the new geodatabase. Together, these GIS services will enhance data accessibility and functionality, improving the DPU's GIS data management.

Gary Wilkison, vice president of Avineon's Geospatial and Engineering Services division, stated, "Avineon's team of professionals has extensive experience in performing data conversion and other related GIS services for municipal clients in the utility industry. We look forward to applying this expertise and our proven quality and project management methodologies to help the city of Richmond achieve its present and future GIS goals."

EMA, Inc. and Mansai Corporation will support Avineon as subcontractors on the project. EMA is a specialized consulting firm focusing on the technology and business management needs of utility, public works/municipal and manufacturing organizations. The firm has extensive experience in GIS consulting and application development for municipal customers. Mansai provides highly skilled and experienced information technology professionals to a wide variety of customers.

About Avineon

Avineon, a CMMI Maturity Level 3 and ISO 9001:2000 registered company, is a diversified high technology company that provides information technology (IT), geospatial, engineering and program management services. With headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, and offices in Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Virginia, Avineon also maintains subsidiaries in Europe and India. In IT, Avineon specializes in web-based architecture, systems engineering, application development and on-going network and security support. For additional information please visit www.avineon.com.

Press Contact :
Kara Schiltz DPR Group / 919-678-9200, ext. 101 / kschiltz@dprgroup.com

< Back to 2007 Press Releases