2018

CSS Corp wins Silver Stevie® in 2018 Sales & Customer Service Awards

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CSS Corp a new-age IT services and technology Support Company, today announced that it has won the Silver Stevie® Award in the “Innovation in Customer Service in the Telecommunications Industry” category at the 2018 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The results were declared during the award ceremony on Friday, February 23 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. CSS Corp was acknowledged for its deep expertise in enhancing customer experience and improving top-line revenue based on the customer insights generated by support operations.

The Premium Tech Support (PTS) platform from CSS Corp was recognized for its industry-leading innovation and unique value proposition. The platform enables Hi-Tech and telecom companies to launch customer support operations faster, infuse intelligence into interactions, and drive additional revenue opportunities. PTS encompasses pre-built telecom specific domain offerings, 360-degree customer context, intelligent process guidance, and actionable insights that enhance customer interactions.

CSS Corp’s PTS platform is built on a revenue-sharing framework that transforms cost centers into profit centers and converts non-revenue generating customer queries into revenue streams. Using the platform, customers also have the flexibility to add new services to the platform and augment their existing portfolio. The platform leverages AI & analytics to gather deeper customer intelligence and proposes the best services and products that drive additional revenue.

Speaking on the occasion, Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer, CSS Corp said, “Our relentless focus on improving customer engagements has helped us to rapidly innovate for our customers and yield powerful and measurable impact to their business. Being a new-age services company, customer experience and revenue generation through digital has been our core focus, and we constantly endeavor to deliver contextual intelligence to our clients that helps them transform their cost centers into profit centers.”

“We are thrilled to be recognized by Stevie, for the second time in the last 6 months. We will continue to innovate and push the envelope to ensure our services blend with our customer expectations and drive business value.” he further added.

More than 2,500 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide, in seven specialized judging committees.
About CSS Corp

CSS Corp is a new age IT services and technology support company that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, cloud and digital to address customer needs. The company partners with leading enterprises to help realize their strategic business outcomes. Its team of 5,500 technology professionals across 16 global locations are passionate about helping customers differentiate and succeed. For more information, please visit www.csscorp.com.

About The Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 10,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 60 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

 

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Organizations need to adopt a systematic approach towards assessing employee skills

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Visweswara Rao, SVP & Chief HR Officer at CSS Corp decodes the ICT skills landscape in an interview to Dataquest. Excerpts:

If you look at the ICT skills landscape, what according to you are the two challenges the industry is facing now?

According to IDC Research, the advent of emerging technologies including AI, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and AR will enable the next wave of growth in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, widening the overall market opportunity to $5.5 trillion by 2020.

However, the shortage of skilled workforce is emerging as a major challenge to growth and future in the ICT sector, especially in India. Emerging technologies are prompting businesses to reimagine their business models and engagement journeys. They are enabling organizations to achieve business outcomes much faster and nimbler. Hence, the demand for completely new sets of skills is unprecedented.

ICT industry is evolving at an exponential pace. In this context, it is extremely important for technology leaders to focus on fostering a learning culture that would enable employees to build skills on new age technologies that are contextual to ICT. The two big skills and people related challenges the ICT industry is facing now is (a) lack of expertise in digital technologies and (b) lack of contextual application of digital while solving business problems.

One of the approaches to tackle this problem is to encourage and promote partnerships between the industry and academia. Many companies in ICT industry are collaborating with universities, academia, and local governments to bridge these gaps and boost the innovation quotient in new tech areas.

Organizations need to adopt a systematic approach towards assessing employee skills on an ongoing basis in emerging areas, identify gaps and align them with relevant learning modules. This would ensure skill-level gaps are addressed regularly and also ensures employees are future ready.

Organizations should also adopt unconventional hiring methods like hackathons and break the code models to attract niche skillsets from the market.

Niche skills like AI and analytics are required for all engineering and technical students, as they are the foundational levers of all digital engagements, and this is possible only if universities are constantly updating their curriculums to keep up with the pace of technology changes. For e.g. skills like AI and data analytics are sector-agnostic and have been delivering transformational benefits to companies across all industries.

The Digital disruption coupled with automation has completely changed the nature of tech skills required for today’s ICT jobs – as an organization how are you coping with sourcing the right skills?

Staying competitive in services business requires continuously improving skill sets and competencies. To augment our efforts towards enhancing our technology competency, we launched ‘Reimagine’, a digital career progression framework to reorient our service lines and re-align the growth of our employees to meet the growing business needs.

Our “Reimagine” Digital Career Progression Framework has been specifically built to fast-track employee reskilling initiatives within the organization. In 2017, we won the NASSCOM Award for having one of the best digital reskilling platforms in the Indian IT industry. The framework facilitates an innovative approach to employee up-skilling and cross-skilling in digital technologies. So far we have seen 9000+ course enrollments in the last 12 months.

The Reimagine framework promotes a multi-disciplinary approach towards acquiring new domain and technology skill sets. The framework includes structured learning paths around AI, automation, data science, machine learning and other topics in a logical progression. The Reimagine framework equips employees with an analytical and problem-solving mindset of curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking.

Some of the key aspects of CSS Corp’s Reimagine Framework are: Digital Re-profiling: Enabling employee at all levels of the pyramid – Digital awareness, digital basics, digital intermediary & digital advanced Democratization of Innovation: Labs with access to emerging technologies like AI, analytics, cloud, DevOps, IoT, and mobile

Incubation Hub: Prototyping and designing customer engagement platforms/solutions e.g. CSS Corp’s AI Platform- Cognitive CX Platform Hyper-Personalization of Learning Modules: Anytime, anywhere and any device learning through Virtual University, MOOCs, and JAM Additionally, CSS Corp also has an ongoing partnership with BITS Pilani on a program called ‘Earn As You Learn’ – a specialized M. Tech work integrated learning program. A program that helps CSS Corp employees to acquire knowledge and skills required for excelling in their careers with the added advantage of gaining a top-notch M.Tech. Degree in software engineering from one of India’s most prestigious universities.

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CSS Corp named “Leader” in NelsonHall’s NEAT Research on Digital Customer Experience

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CSS Corp, a new-age IT services and technology support company, announced today that it has been named as a “leader” in NelsonHall’s NEAT vendor evaluation for Digital Customer Experience. NelsonHall is a leading independent global analyst firm for the business and IT services industry. The study evaluated 26 top vendors on their ability to drive revenue generation for their customers through the adoption of digital technologies.

The study underscored CSS Corp’s focus on driving revenue generation for customers through the contextual adoption of emerging technologies like AI, analytics, and automation. CSS Corp has been offering CX management services for some of the world’s most recognized brands and helping them create more engaging CX, drive enhanced revenue generation per user (ARPU), and increase predictability in business operations.

The company is betting big on its cognitive platform, Cognitive Customer Experience Platform, to bolster its customer experience strategy. Cognitive Customer Experience Platform is an integral part of CSS Corp’s Cognitive Support Services, which is an outcome-based automation solution to help brands transform their customer experience management approach. This solution automates 30-50 percent of a typical customer support operation and the customers are charged only for the transactions that the platform resolves. The solution is completely modular, so customers can pick and choose the components that they need and integrate them into their existing technology infrastructure. Customers usually do not make any upfront investment to use Cognitive Customer Experience Platform and only pay from the cost savings realized through automation.

Manish Tandon, CEO, CSS Corp, said, “Brands are innovatively using technology and processes to drive critical customer outcomes, and cognitive services are at the heart of digital customer experience. At CSS Corp, we continue to drive new outcome-based engagement models that enable our customers to embrace digital transformation in a risk-free manner.”

“To be recognized by NelsonHall as a leader in digital CX is another testimony of our capabilities and experience in winning customer trust and forging meaningful relationships in the ecosystem,” he further added.

Sunil Mittal – EVP, Chief Sales, and Marketing Officer, said, “As businesses continue to evolve, building engaging CX can be the critical differentiator in driving business outcomes. At CSS Corp, our continued focus is to drive stellar customer experiences through our cognitive approach and help our customers unlock new growth and revenue generation opportunities. This latest recognition by NelsonHall marks another milestone in our journey to be a trusted technology partner for organizations globally.”

Ivan Kotzev, CX Lead Analyst at NelsonHall, said, “CSS Corp’s capabilities to integrate analytics and automation in context-driven support helps the effective activation of digital channels and the delivery of personalization. The company’s proprietary CX platforms are a differentiator in assisting clients on their digital transformation journeys.

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Flashback 2018: Cloud’s popularity soars but policy challenges are on the horizon

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Cloud computing has been among the biggest talking points in technology this year, as large Indian enterprises embarked on digital transformation journeys driven by the promise of higher revenues and improved productivity, lead generation, customer satisfaction and business intelligence.

Several startups, too, were born in the cloud in the year gone by. Simply put, this means they started their operations in the cloud after being lured by service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, Oracle and Alibaba, among others.

These services ranged from storage to computing and analytics for business intelligence, with nimbleness being the overarching theme.

Abbas Godhrawala, partner-advisory services at EY, said that cloud computing had indeed taken off in India during 2018.

“Cloud customers now include everyone from startups to large Indian corporations,” Godhrawala told TechCircle. “The biggest advantage of cloud for organisations is the cost benefit due to resource pooling. We believe cloud will continue to accelerate in India and gather momentum owing to the growing trend of digital adoption.”

Market research firm Gartner had projected that India’s public cloud services revenue would grow 37.5% in 2018 to nearly $2.5 billion. This would see India outpace the global market, which was expected to grow 21% to reach $175.8 billion in 2018.

Godhrawala said that there has been a rapid rise in enterprise spend on public cloud, notably Azure and AWS, while private cloud spending has been declining.

Phanikishore Burre, CSS Corp senior vice president and global delivery head-networks, cloud, infrastructure & security services, said that cloud has certainly gone mainstream in India in terms of adoption.

“Migrating to cloud has created a paradigm shift in enabling organisations to launch businesses faster and smarter,” Burre explained. “Cloud has emerged as a critical business driver for more and more businesses seeking to achieve competitive differentiation and faster time-to-market.”

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CSS Corp Conducts Computer Literacy Training Program

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CSS Corp has held a ‘Computer Literacy Program’ at a Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Chennai from January 11 to February 2, 2018. This initiative is done to engage the students in Digital Literacy for which they carried out various training programs and set up a computer lab in the school.

CSS Corp’s objective is to reach out to students to augment their computer knowledge. The entire CSR activity was executed with the involvement of CSS Corp employees.

Keeping the CSR initiative in mind, they conducted engaging sessions with the students led by the employees. The activities involved:

  • Training and conducting workshops on safe internet usage for higher secondary students
  •  Populating useful tips on importance of safe disposal of e-wastes to higher secondary students
  •  Career counselling on their overall development for 8th and 9th grade students
  • Setting up a computer lab with 25 refurbished desktops & UPS

In the past, they have also conducted digital literacy programs for Grade – 11 students for close to 2000 students across schools in Chennai like Government higher secondary schools at Perungalathur, Tambaram, Saidapet and P. K Government Higher Secondary School at Ambattur.

 

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Workplace Excellence Season Three – Episode 1

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“This season of Workplace Excellence is focussed on showcasing those companies that are leaving no stone unturned to achieve workplace excellence. Featuring in this episode are two companies – CSS Corp and Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance.”

Broadcast 1 in association with Times Now brings forth Workplace Excellence Season 3 – an initiative aimed at giving an insight into the corporate cultures of successful companies that are leaving no stone unturned to keep innovating and progressing. In this episode, we showcase two companies – CSS Corp and Canara HSBC OBC Life Insurance. Both the companies are driven by one great idea and that is to build a great workplace culture for its employees. These companies are focused on training future leaders and engaging employees for social skills, in order to achieve workplace excellence.

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Reskilling: The Cardinal Rule Aspiring Technologists, CXOs Need to Embrace

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Enterprises have begun to work closely with academia and students to enable reskilling, and lead investments and collaboration in cognitive and emerging technologies
Artificial intelligence is now an actuality that Indian enterprises are looking to embrace or have already embraced to a certain extent. The global phenomenon is rapidly driving disruptive changes in the adoption of new technologies, business models, and jobs. From creating more immersive experiences for customers to enabling productivity, and helping businesses become more agile, AI is poised to become a global economic growth engine. However, skills shortage has become a hindrance and reskilling a necessary trump card for enterprises looking to truly embrace artificial intelligence.Nishikant Nigam, EVP and Chief Delivery Officer at CSS Corp feels that as cognitive technologies become an integral part of how businesses and people operate, ecosystem players – right from organizations to the government to talent have to adopt fresh thinking and approach to ride the digital wave.

 “Aspiring technologists have to seriously consider reskilling – raising their skillsets, learning from different sources, and investing in peer-learning, while remaining agile and responsive to the demands of the market. The days when one could choose a technology, specialize in it and work on it for years together are now history. The new mantra is to continuously evolve, be experimental, and be open to and invest in continuous and lifelong learning,” he says.

In fact, it is not just the students or aspiring technologists that need to consider reskilling, even CXOs need to be onboard the digital transformation march to encourage the same in their organizations. Mr Nigam says quoting an Intel-IDC report from December 2017 that nearly 70% organizations in India are expected to deploy AI solutions before 2020. Sectors like telecom, media, and technology in India have been the top early adopters of AI, while retail services and healthcare are supposed to see a surge by 2019.

“Organizations have started building their own labs to create a breeding ground for digital technologies. These labs can find solutions to crucial business problems and also enable employees to come up with disruptive solutions and learn new skills to upgrade themselves. In order to foster and create truly digitized organizations, senior leaders and CXOs must recognize and encourage a strong digital culture within their organizations, along with a strong digital strategy,” says Mr Nigam.

“Creating a digital culture helps organizations to enable more customer-centric engagements and build better solutions. This in turn can help them to bring employees more in alignment with customers’ journeys, and encourage them to make informed, context-aware decisions, focus on continuous improvement and take calculated risks,” he adds.

Uptime, service responsiveness and security are the top three concerns for a CIO states Mr Nigam while adding that AI based IT ops can amplify these three aspects that drive better employee engagement and experience. AI brings in an aspect of self-learning and continuous improvement over a period of time which can bring in levels of proactive performance and remediation that humans cannot match.

Since it has become of utmost importance to formulate conducive regulatory policies that are critical to drive investments, collaboration, and adoption of emerging technologies, enterprises have begun to work closely with academia and students to raise skill gaps, and lead investments and collaboration in cognitive and emerging technologies.

In order to do the same, CSS Corp has built a digital career progression framework to reorient their service lines and re-align the growth of employees to meet growing business needs. Termed ‘Reimagine’, the framework has specifically been built to fast-track employee reskilling initiatives within the organization, in niche digital technologies including robotic process automation (RPA), AI, analytics, cloud, DevOps and IoT.

“Additionally, the framework enables collaborative learning and greater personalization through Virtual University, MOOCs, online portals and learning communities. Reimagine promotes democratization of learning and fosters a culture of innovation within the organization,” says Mr Nigam.

CSS Corp has won the NASSCOM Digital Skills 2017 award for having one of the best digital reskilling platforms in the Indian IT industry, and results of Reimagine has brought in significant increases in critical business aspects, including resource utilization, team productivity, employee learning and development, and increase in revenue per employee. The framework has also created more career and growth opportunities, while resulting in an overall drop in attrition, Mr Nigam declares.

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Trends that will drive technology services in digital space in 2018

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In the early days of computing, demands from business stakeholders pushed the evolution of technologies as new capabilities were built to order.

Over the last decade, technology has shifted from demand-side to supply-side economics. The emergence of capabilities first dreamed of by technologists, not business strategists, has moved IT from an enabling capability to a differentiating one.

In my view, 2018 will be about striving to realise tangible outcomes from the transformative initiatives happening across organisations today. Global brands are looking to leverage technology to beat their competition and serve their customers better.

There are some underlying megatrends that will drive these initiatives in 2018.

 

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CSS Corp positioned in Winner’s Circle in HfS Research’s Telecommunications Operations Services Report

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CSS Corp, a new-age IT services and technology support company, today announced that it has been recognized in the “Winner’s Circle” in HfS Research’s Blueprint 2018 report on telecom operations services.

The report assessed 18 service providers in execution and innovation, covering aspects including strategic vision, investments in future capabilities, robust services delivery, and driving new insights and models.

The report positioned CSS Corp as a leader in telecom operations services that excel both at execution and innovation. CSS Corp has been enabling telecom organizations to improve customer experience, create new revenue streams, and enhance operational efficiency, strategically aligned with their business goals. The company has been investing heavily in the Triple-A Trifecta (AI, Automation, and Analytics) to improve Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and enable differentiated growth opportunities for the telecom and networking industry.

Elena Christopher, Vice President – Industry Research at HfS Research, “Telecommunication firms and their ecosystem partners are working diligently to modernize their core businesses while simultaneously investing in and developing new offerings. CSS Corp has quietly emerged as a strong service partner for these firms helping to enable the digital transformation of network services and customer experience, enabling both optimization and new revenue potential. These timely skills coupled with industry-leading relationship management and flexible business models have elevated CSS Corp to the HfS Winner’s Circle.”

Manish Tandon, CEO, CSS Corp, said, “Telecom companies are shifting gears towards an ecosystem-based business model partnering synergistically with digital content service providers. With seismic changes in the market environment and increased executive push towards digitization, telcos are forging new business models to create and capture value. Our vision to drive growth for telecom and networking companies is driven by a clear appreciation of these disruptive forces and deep understanding of the telecom industry.”

“Being recognized in the Winner’s Circle by HfS Research is an important milestone that validates our innovation and execution capabilities in telecom. We continue to seek out new opportunities for co-innovation and collaboration with our clients, laying a clear vision for the industry as a whole,” he added further.

Sunil Mittal – EVP, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, said, “Leveraging our deep industry know-how, we have continuously endeavored to digitally enable telcos to transform from traditional service models to new age service models. This recognition by HfS Research is another testimony to our capabilities and reinforces the faith that our customers and stakeholders have shown in us over the years.

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What Artificial Intelligence Means to Businesses in Terms of Cost Optimization, Efficiency and HR

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               Artificial Intelligence magnifies the role of HR professionals into a much broader and strategic role, which is backed with data analytics and AI-driven insights

 

The rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence is influencing economies, disciplines, services and business models, and in the process modernizing operations, reducing costs, increasing service agility, and harmonizing customer experiences.

Artificial Intelligence for Cost Optimization and Efficiency in Business Operations

Intelligent automation platforms bring in a convergence of human intelligence, analytics, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), which in turn can result in improved business agility, operational excellence, resilience, and faster-time-to-market. Such platforms can cohesively predict models and subsequently manage/solve complex infrastructure ecosystems effortlessly, resulting in drastically improved CX and thus, simplifying employee efforts considerably.

Some of the specific segments that Artificial Intelligence is being used by enterprises include:

  • IT Helpdesk: An Artificial Intelligence enabled IT Helpdesk embraces intelligent automation, and advanced analytics, to deliver knowledge-centered and context-driven support, serving as a single point of contact for all IT service needs. This results in reduced human intervention, and hence reduced labor costs, improved the end-user experience and enables the next level of productivity.
  • Self-Help Tools: Organizations are onboarding cost-effective support channels like using self-help, Knowledge Base (KB), virtual assistants and live chat to fulfill the requirements of end-users. Using Artificial Intelligence and automation, most common user queries can be prevented by understanding what your users want before they turn to support.
  • Virtual Assistants – Virtual Assistants can offer personalized and context-driven support, with a human-like interaction, through the usage of Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Deep Learning techniques. VAs can constantly learn from user interactions, and build on its ever-growing knowledge base. The Virtual Assistant understands user intent and responds to queries in real time.
  • Omni-channel Solution – Omni-channel support promotes enterprise collaboration services through mediums such as blogs, wikis, social media and KBs. It also provides engineers with extensive use cases, high visibility into each customer issue, including transaction history and most recent channel interactions.

Artificial Intelligence in HR Management, Recruitment, and Employment

Artificial Intelligence magnifies the role of HR professionals into a much broader and strategic role, which is backed with data analytics and AI-driven insights. Nearly 40% of companies are using some form of AI in HR, including prominent companies like IBM, GE, Facebook, and SAP.

AI can aid people management within organizations in several areas like accelerating the hiring process by automating screening of talent, digitizing the interview process, streamlining employee onboarding, and improving workplace learning.

How Exactly AI and Cobot are Applied to Enhance Customer Value?

With advancements in speech recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI has become the new frontier that is truly transforming customer engagements and augmenting human potential.

A blended model of human experts and AI can offer several potential business benefits:

  • Reduced Cost: A recent BI Intelligence report suggests that businesses can cut labor cost by 29% when chatbots and other AI are deployed. Though complete automation is not feasible, automating a percentage of customer success and sales positions can result in significant savings.
  • Improved customer experience: AI reaches a wider audience and stores critical data points that companies can leverage to personalize the offerings and also the buying experience of the digitally empowered customers. AI also helps brands optimize their product development with improved customer intelligence, which in turn delivers delightful customer experience.
  • Greater consistency due to reduced human assistance: With AI revolutionizing all walks of business and life, consumers aspire to seamlessly interact with multiple apps rather than multiple layers of real human assistants thereby leading to reduced reliance on humanitarian assistance.

At CSS Corp, AI-based automation is an integral part of our service delivery organization supporting global customers in various strategic and modernization initiatives. CSS Corp’s intelligent automation framework brings together two different platforms that drive modularity and nimbleness to meet the evolving customer expectations:

Contelli – Cognitive automation for IT operations (automation of back-office operations in the cloud, Data Centers, telecom networks and security)

Cognitive Customer Experience Platform – Cognitive assistant solution (front-office solution for customer support, customer interactions, and customer analytics)

Our approach in AI for business and IT operations are largely based on customers’ business critical metrics and more closely aligned with factors impacting business outcomes.  Our AI strategy did not develop out of labor arbitrage but rather from superior customer experience, providing instant gratification and delighting customers.

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CSS Corp is now Movate

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