(San Diego, CA- March 9, 2004) – The Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), the leading industry Association for IT support professionals, today announced the selection of the winners for the annual SSPA WebStar Service Awards. Chosen as the best in delivering web-based customer service, the winners will be announced and recognized at the SSPA Conference@San Diego, April 5-7, 2004.

“This year’s WebStar Service Award winners are all exceptional companies that deliver world-class web-based support,” said Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/CEO. “This industry-wide recognition is unlike any other because a panel of their peers have evaluated each company application and determined that they deliver the best service possible.”

All SSPA Member companies are eligible to nominate themselves for the WebStar Service Awards. SSPA provides each Applicant with an electronic application as a benchmark/guideline. The Award Applicants take this task very seriously and spend a considerable amount of time on this arduous, but rewarding process. Many non-winners have said that, even though they did not win an Award, the whole process was well worth the time and effort. They indicate they learned a lot from the process and were able to discover in what areas they can use improvement.

Past WebStar Winners include:
Oracle * Novell * Cognos * Best Software * Network Appliance * Aspen Technology * Sybase
Mercury Interactive and many others.

The SSPA Conference @ San Diego “Best Practices Showcase” brings together hundreds of support managers, directors and executives for 3 great days of expert presentations, “power panels”, interactive workshops and over 40 best practices sharing sessions on the top business problems facing support professionals. For more information on the conference, please visit www.thesspa.com/sandiego.

About SSPA
Founded in 1989, the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) was formed to focus on the specific needs of service executives who are responsible for support centers and overall customer relations. Today, the SSPA represents over 22,500 service professionals at 2,700 support centers worldwide. These executives look to SSPA to provide insight into the future of support services, a road map of best practices within our industry and access to the best service and support vendors. SSPA has become the center of support providing a reliable and comprehensive resource for news, research, benchmarking, standards and collaboration.

SSPA was created for professionals, managers and executives that make their living in the IT support services community. It is not a generic, one-size-fits all website where nobody ever feels like they belong. SSPA is dynamic, interactive, living resource specifically designed for the unique needs of support professionals. This exciting virtual community creates a forum for constant interaction with peers, industry experts, technology vendors and much more. For more information regarding the SSPA and other related divisions, log on to www.thesspa.com or send an email to info@thesspa.com.