The development of gBiz as a product and the signing of a licensing agreement with CGI has created new economic development opportunities for SNB and placed it firmly in a new and broader role in creating public value for the province. gBiz is an extension of the e-government model originally pioneered by SNB and developed in part by CGI. According to Georgette Roy, chair of the Board of Directors of SNB, “SNB together with CGI has leveraged gBiz into both an award-winning services platform and an economic development engine.” The gBiz framework as described by CGI, provides service catalogs, payment facilities, and methods for reaching back into legacy mainframes allowing for the development of repeatable solutions resulting in reductions in cost and development time. gBiz is built on Microsoft products and uses a range of open standards technology. The primary example of the leverage provided by this product and the SNB-CGI relationship is the use of gBiz in the development of “joined up services” in Suffolk County in the United Kingdom. The County was faced with a short time-frame for the required delivery of services and looked to the gBiz framework as the strategy of choice. In December of 2004, SNB received a major software licensing royalty check for the sale by CGI of the gBiz framework to the County of Suffolk. A second example of the economic development impact is the siting of the CGI Global E-Government Headquarters in Fredericton, NB. In 2001, CGI established its “g-commerce lab” in Fredericton. This move was seen as a first step in new opportunities for growth in the Atlantic region.