Global Crossing and Lockheed Martin Extend Agreement to Provide Royal Mail's Managed IP Solution
6 July 2005
London -- July 6, 2005 -- Global Crossing (NASDAQ: GLBC) announced a three-year extension of its eight-year agreement with Lockheed Martin to provide a fully managed IP solution for Royal Mail in the United Kingdom. Royal Mail is the nationwide postal service operated by holding company Royal Mail Group plc. The extension is valued at $14 million and means the contract will now run to 2011.
"The extension of our agreement with Lockheed Martin illustrates how Global Crossing is following through on its strategy to develop partnerships and alliances, building on the strong relationships we have with systems integrators in the UK to expand these relationships across the globe," said John Legere, Global Crossing's chief executive officer. "Global Crossing will continue to provide Lockheed Martin and thus the Royal Mail with the high performance required to support such a time-sensitive operation, as we have done since 2001."
Lockheed Martin is the prime systems integrator for the Address Interpretation (AI) project - a program implemented by the Royal Mail to provide a fully integrated, national mail processing system that improves Royal Mail's efficiency and reduces its operating costs.
The AI system provides a networked solution linking the regional mail centers distributed across the UK to create an integrated, national network of mail processing machines that sort and direct letters for efficient dispatch. Global Crossing provides and manages the wide-area IP network connecting the mail centers and a number of Manual Data Entry Centre locations (MDECs) via fully resilient, dual, diversely routed circuits.
"We needed a system that would be more cost effective, solve our outstanding problems and create a platform for future business," said Dave Smith, head of technology for mail sorting at the Royal Mail. "To do that we needed to integrate the best technology from across the industry and we couldn't see a path to delivering that on our own. The solution provided by Lockheed and Global Crossing has already delivered a 50 percent increase in automated address reading, and there will be more improvements to come."
By integrating individual mail processing machines to operate and communicate within the AI system framework, the Royal Mail has increased efficiency, overall functionality and performance for mail services in the UK. The AI application supported by Global Crossing's resilient network infrastructure automatically takes an electronic image of a mail piece at the originating mail center, extracts the address information by optical character recognition algorithms and, if required, human interpretation and then uses this information to sort the mail piece for transport to its destination. At the destination mail center, mail pieces are sorted once more for delivery, using the information provided by the originating mail center across Global Crossing's network.
Its relationship with Lockheed Martin demonstrates that Global Crossing is delivering on its indirect strategy to maintain existing and develop new systems integrator partnerships globally. Global Crossing provides its partners flexible IP solutions, backed by stringent service level agreements over its globally secure IP network with unparalleled service and support.
about Royal Mail
Royal Mail Group plc is a public limited company wholly owned by the government, with annual sales in excess of £8 billion and employs 196,000 people.
Our marketplace is changing rapidly and we are providing hundreds of services to meet new demands - from electronic billing to banking, from warehousing to customer returns.
About Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin UK, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation, is a leader in systems integration working on major programmes spanning the aerospace, defence, civil and commercial sectors with significant capabilities in the transport infrastructure market. In the UK, Lockheed Martin has annual sales in the range of £400-600 million working with more than 75 business partners. Lockheed Martin employs over 1,000 people at sites across the UK.
Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services.
About Global Crossing
Global Crossing (NASDAQ: GLBC) provides telecommunications solutions over the world's first integrated global IP-based network. Its core network connects more than 300 cities and 30 countries worldwide, and delivers services to more than 500 major cities, 50 countries and 6 continents around the globe. The company's global sales and support model matches the network footprint and, like the network, delivers a consistent customer experience worldwide.
