IssueAlert Emerging Technologies ~ October,
2004
Conversant Implemented at
Intermountain Gas
By Jon T. Brock, Chief Operating Officer, UtiliPoint
[News Item] Conversant, Inc. announced earlier this week that
Intermountain Gas Company has completed an implementation of their
new customer information and billing system. Conversant's Customer
Watch CIS solution went live on August 2, 2004, serving Intermountain
Gas Company's more than 250,000 natural gas customers in southern
Idaho. Following the successful completion of a Pilot Program
in October 2003, the Customer Watch solution was implemented on
time and under budget, nine months later.
Analysis: This announcement includes a statement that is rarely
heard in the world of utility CIS implementations: “on time
and under budget.” This elusive statement has come to rest
at Boise, ID-based Intermountain Gas Company. UtiliPoint®
believes that statement of “on time and under budget”
can visit more utilities due to a new architectural framework
that is being deployed in the market today, an open-source modular
approach to application development, licensed software, and maintenance.
Let's take a closer look at this project.
Intermountain Gas
According to the Intermountain Gas Company website, the
story began in 1950 when Nat and Myrtis Campbell read a newspaper
article that peaked their interest in the natural gas industry.
The company was incorporated that year. After five years of hard
work laying the foundation for a new public utility company, Intermountain
Gas Company received certification from the Idaho Public Utilities
Commission on December 10, 1955. Then, on December 31, 1955, it
connected the first five customers.
Today, Intermountain Gas Company is a privately owned natural
gas utility headquartered in Boise, Idaho, that serves approximately
250,000 customers. Of those, industrial customers account for
45 percent of Intermountain Gas Company's sales and include the
likes of potato processors, chemical producers, fertilizer plants,
and electronic factories that provide jobs for over 40,000 Idahoans.
The commercial customers account for 19 percent of sales and residential
customers about 36 percent.
Why Replace The CIS?
Earlier this week I spoke with Stan Royal, CEO of Conversant.
According to Royal, “the utility market today is looking
for a compelling reason to buy a new customer information system
(CIS). There is no compelling reason to replace an existing CIS
with older technology.”
I also interviewed Intermountain's Chief Financial Officer and
project sponsor, Paul Powell earlier this week. Powell explained
that Intermountain had to replace its CIS due to a legacy system
that had been developed and maintained on an HP-3000. HP announced
that support for the 3000 would be going away in 2006 and that
was a driving force behind Intermountain's decision to replace.
In this year's survey of 305 utilities in North America, on a
scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is very important and 1 is not important
at all, the determining factors from the 48 respondents that are
in the market for a new CIS were for ease of use, functionality,
and ability to integrate.
UtiliPoint® research has confirmed the integration issue.
Today, many utilities of all sizes are continuing to have difficulty
integrating the CIS to various other applications that exist within
the utility enterprise. Powell acknowledged that some may question
the complexity of a 250,000 customer gas company but assured UtiliPoint®
that Intermountain had to interface CustomerWatch to 16 different
systems within the utility.
Some of these systems include work management, meter reading,
asset management, and back-end financials. Newer technologies
and application frameworks are enabling better integration in
the utility enterprise. These include object oriented architectures
that employ either a .NET and/or J2EE design. As these emerging
technologies enter the tool-box of CIS vendors, integration issues
should come down on the list of determining factors.
History as a Teacher
Technology is a catalyst in any market. If we return
to the late 1980s and early 1990s as the United States began to
recover from an economic downturn, a software vendor stepped out
in front to offer new client-server technology. The mainstream
technology at the time was large backend databases fronted by
tools such as CICS. Critics claimed that client-server technology
would fail under large implementations that required complex calculations
on large backend databases. More specifically, analysts claimed
that client-server would “never” be used in large
enterprise applications.
While the critics warned, one vendor entered the enterprise space
and proved them wrong. This vendor was PeopleSoft. More specifically,
PeopleSoft had a history of innovating at technology shifts. It
started in the mid-1980s when company founders Dave Duffield and
Ken Morris built a human resources application on a client-server
platform instead of the traditional mainframe, adding needed flexibility
and putting more power into the hands of users.
Many utility analysts and customer care providers believe that
the industry is once again at that critical technology shift;
one from an n-tiered architecture to an Internet web-based architecture.
As previously mentioned, the two prominent technologies battling
for market share are Microsoft's .NET architecture and J2EE (or
java) architecture. Conversant chose the java architecture years
ago and is just now getting some market validation via this implementation.
The Project
Intermountain's Powell began this project by doing a
good amount of due diligence on the market. Having previous work
experience at Accenture, he knew what to expect. He knew that
these projects were large, had a high failure rate, and often
missed their budgets and timelines. He also knew that his HP-3000
would be unsupported in a few years, so he had to do something.
Originally Powell's team brought in the top three vendors in
the Tier 1 space, one other vendor and actually excluded Conversant.
The technical team at Intermountain finally convinced Powell to
bring Conversant in for a look. “When we did we were quite
impressed with the new open-source technology,” stated Powell.
After much scrutiny and requirement/scenario testing, Intermountain
selected Conversant in May of 2003 and chose to do a pilot beginning
in late summer 2003. Powell recalls, “We wanted a configurable
product so we told Conversant to install it in-house, train us
on it and then leave. Let us 'play' with it to get comfortable
with the system. If it were truly configurable, then Conversant
would be able to bring it in, bring it up rapidly, and demonstrate
its flexibility.” And they did.
Intermountain had three key premises for the CIS project:
Once the pilot had proved out, Conversant was officially selected
and the implementation effort began. Intermountain has an IT staff
of about 25 people. The CIS implementation effort took about 10
of those resources while Conversant offered 8 resources. No integrators
were used.
Powell was impressed with the architecture. “It came as
a new, 'clean' architecture—for instance, some older systems
have layers and layers of technology that has built up over time
and it takes more to support. This architecture is very clean.
We run it on an HP 9000 server with an Oracle database and the
LINUX operating system. Intermountain has the skill sets to support
it easily with our small IT shop.”
Two sub-systems that also ran on the HP-3000 were actually re-developed
using Conversant's tool-kit and re-integrated into the resulting
new system which was also interfaced to 16 other systems within
the utility. Due to the new architecture and the resources on
the effort, this CIS project completed and billing went live 9
months after the implementation began, on time and on budget.
Conversant has sold the source code to Intermountain feeling
comfortable that it can still maintain version control while giving
the utility the freedom it needs to make modifications and/or
interface to other sub-systems. This is done via a tool-set provided
by Conversant that examines a baseline system, compares it to
the changes that a utility may have done, calculates the differences,
allows the utility to choose which changes to keep, and bring
those changes into the upward version. As a result, it gives the
utility a lot of flexibility.
In retrospect, Powell states, “I thought that the Conversant
team was excellent - very good and knowledgeable—they provided
a mix of CIS project experience with utility folks from Empire
District Electric who had originally developed the CustomerWatch
system. I found them very professional and easy to work with.”
As the utility information technology landscape redefines itself,
new technology architectures will begin to enable the most envied
words of a utility IT manager, on time and under budget.
UtiliPoint's Emerging Technologies IssueAlert articles are
compiled based on the independent analysis of UtiliPoint consultants,
researchers, and analysts. The opinions expressed in UtiliPoint's
Emerging Technologies IssueAlert articles are not intended to
predict financial performance of companies discussed, or to be
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purpose in publishing its Emerging Technologies IssueAlert articles
is to offer an independent perspective regarding the key events
occurring in the energy industry, based on its long-standing reputation
as an expert on energy issues.
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