Avineon Appoints Utility Industry Veteran, Akhlesh Kaushiva, to Vice President of Commercial IT Services Division

Alexandria, Va. – Feb. 26, 2007 – Avineon, Inc., a successful provider of IT, geospatial, engineering and program management services, announced today that Akhlesh Kaushiva has joined Avineon as vice president of the company’s Commercial IT Services division. With more than 30 years of engineering and IT systems experience, Kaushiva will lead Avineon’s business intelligence and business process management efforts among other IT systems for the company’s growing commercial sector. Avineon recently formed the Commercial IT Services division to further focus on meeting the needs of its strong base of commercial clients including large electric, gas, water and telecom utilities.   

Kaushiva holds extensive experience in implementing and integrating major utility IT systems including outage management (OMS), mobile dispatch (MDS) and geographic information (GIS). Lately, he has been involved in the evaluation of automated metering infrastructure (AMI), meter data management systems (MDS) and distribution automation (DA). Prior to Avineon, Kaushiva held multiple positions at Pepco Holdings, Inc. (PHI) and its subsidiary, Pepco, a long-time Avineon customer. He most recently served as manager of IT projects leading integration projects for Atlantic City Electric, Delmarva Power and Pepco and was a key decision maker in the company’s selection of integrated outage management, MDS, GIS and graphic work design (GWD) solutions. In the wake of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, Kaushiva served as Pepco’s technical expert on OMS and MDS and developed recommendations for improved performance. He also developed a long-term GIS strategy for the company to interconnect other secondary systems relying on GIS.

Karlu Rambhala, president and CEO of Avineon, commented, “With Avineon’s strong commercial customer base, particularly with large utility companies, Akhlesh’s extensive background with Pepco will provide immediate value to our team. His technical, business and operations experience and leadership will allow Avineon to continue to deliver the innovative approaches and top-quality service to meet our commercial customers’ needs.”

Avineon has worked with a host of utility companies and in 2006 alone, completed projects with SEMCO and Georgia Power among others. In its most recent project for Pepco, Avineon is assisting with the integration of a GWD system with a GIS system to increase efficiency of its outage management system, design process and asset management. For SEMCO, Avineon converted a gas distribution system from manual maps into a new ESRI ArcGIS geodatabase. The conversion allowed SEMCO to integrate key business processes such as CIS, Field Order System and Document Management System with its GIS. The project has helped SEMCO expand its markets, cut operating costs and reduce overall product prices. In addition, Avineon was selected by Georgia Power to migrate its electrical distribution system data to form an enterprise GIS. The new system leverages common business requirements, centralized information technology architecture and collaborative utility company investments, allowing the company to improve customer service, cost containment and profitability.

“I am pleased to be working for a company with such a long-standing and well-respected history in the utility and commercial sector,” stated Kaushiva. “My background at Pepco will serve well at Avineon as we continue to develop and implement optimal system solutions for the commercial sector.”

Kaushiva received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with honors from the University of Maryland and a Master of Science in Computer Science from George Washington University. He is a senior member of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has spoken at key utility industry events. Kaushiva is also a registered professional engineer in the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia.

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 and Florida, Avineon employs more than 140 staff in the United States, and with subsidiaries in Europe and India employs a total staff of 700. 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.

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