GBA Master Series, Inc. Announces Infrastructure Planning Alliance with Black & Veatch Corporation

LENEXA, KS ------ GBA Master Series, Inc., Inc., Lenexa, Kansas, announced today their newly formed infrastructure planning business alliance with Black & Veatch Corporation.

GBA Master Series Infrastructure Management Software is a suite of products used to manage and maintain water, storm water, wastewater, and street systems. The well-designed infrastructure management software enables public works and utilities professionals to efficiently manage their systems. By using the software, industry professionals can quickly and accurately prioritize maintenance and rehabilitation tasks, analyze current and historical data to identify system trends, and to recommend comprehensive budget forecasts.

Black & Veatch's Infrastructure Planning Department provides water and wastewater system planning services to clients around the globe. These projects include master planning activities, hydraulic modeling, pipeline rehabilitation and integrity studies, distribution system water quality modeling, GIS/model/management system integration, and sanitary sewer surveys and infiltration/inflow studies. A primary goal of the execution of the hundreds of projects they have engineered is to identify innovative processes and techniques to produce long-term reliability at the lowest life-cycle cost.

The agreement reached by the two companies consists of the Infrastructure Planning Department of Black & Veatch integrating several modules of the GBA Master Series software suite into planning project execution. The integration will provide increased value and a broader range of infrastructure management capabilities to clients. Those modules include GBA Sewer Master, GBA Water Master, GBA GIS Master, and related toolkits. Black & Veatch will use the software in the execution of projects involving water distribution systems, wastewater collection systems, and related projects for wastewater system engineering, infiltration/inflow analysis, sewer system evaluation, master planning, and environmental assessments.

A part of the agreement includes the development of a software link between the GBA Master Series software programs and Black & Veatch's Sanitary Sewer Management System (SSMS) and Water Distribution Management System (WDMS) hydraulic modeling and master planning software, which provides pre- and post-data processing for a number of standard modeling software systems. Combining these programs will enable clients to more reliably determine expansion or rehabilitation activities of their existing systems.

"We are very excited about the opportunity to work closely with Black & Veatch on continued enhancements to our already strong water and sewer software offerings. Both our firms share similar philosophies regarding data management, GIS development, and the need for industry standards," said Donald E. Pinkston, P.E., President of GBA Master Series, Inc.

"This new relationship with GBA will allow Black & Veatch to provide the best combination of software development and engineering technology to our clients in a cost-effective manner. The capabilities of our firms are complimentary which will create a truly dynamic process resulting in state-of-the-art tools to improve the value we can deliver," said Richard E. Nelson, P.E., Director of Infrastructure Planning of Black & Veatch.

GBA Master Series, Inc. has headquarters in Lenexa, Kansas, and maintains offices in California, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. The suite of software products has been designed and continuously enhanced by civil engineers since its inception in 1984. Written as a client/server application with Microsoft Visual C++, the software uses Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle database platforms.

Additional modules for storm water, street, fleet and equipment are also available, along with modules for maintenance management and customer complaint tracking. All modules are integrated with GBA GIS Master, an extension of ESRI's ArcView® GIS software. For more information about the GBA Master Series suite of infrastructure management software products and services, visit www.gbamasterseries.com.

Black & Veatch is one of the largest and most diversified engineering and construction companies in the world, having completed more than 35,000 projects for some 6,500 different clients around the globe. The construction engineering design firm employs approximately 9,000 professionals in more than 90 offices worldwide in countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Kansas City, Missouri serves as headquarters for the employee-owned company.

Black & Veatch has been ranked 14th by InformationWeek in their list of "Top 500 Technology Innovators," and 61st by Forbes magazine in their list of "500 Largest Private Companies in the U.S." For more information about Black & Veatch, visit its web site at www.bv.com.