At the beginning of this month, consulting, technology
services and outsourcing company Accenture and Irvine, CA-based
NWP Services Corp. (NWP) signed a 10-year outsourcing contract
for information technology, applications management and
development services.
This outsourcing agreement with NWP is the latest in a
growing list of outsourcing deals anticipated by UtiliPoint®
this year and next. Generally, the proof in the pudding
of outsourcing is in the eating—and like several other
utilities, NWP, the largest utility management and resident
billing services provider to the U.S. multifamily housing
industry, is able to cut its costs through the transfer
of software development and software maintenance, customer
care, and billing information to an outsourcer, in this
case Accenture.
As part of this deal, Accenture has agreed to purchase
the Open-cIS billing and customer care application developed
by NWP's Santa Ana, CA-based subsidiary Open-c Solutions.
Open-c Solutions had previously signed a three-year deal
with NWP to provide select billing and customer cares services
for the company. As of the time of the acquisition, NWP
used the Open-cIS to bill individual apartment residents
in multi-tenant housing units for utilities, thereby enabling
property owners to better recover utility costs and manage
development overhead.
In the new agreement, Accenture will take over ongoing
Open-c software maintenance, new development and technology
support responsibilities for the Open-cIS system. Accenture
further gains a foothold for serving NWP's existing customers
that are billed on Open-cIS, which include the customers
of Washington Gas, Washington Gas Energy Services and Wisconsin
Public Service.
Over the past several years, NWP developed Open-c and the
Open-cIS application with an advanced software architecture
and data model to allow companies to configure Open-cIS
to meet their specific needs (whether they are a utility,
a marketer, a billing service bureau, or a hybrid company)
and to ease the complexity and reduce the cost of building
and maintaining billing and customer information systems.
Specifically, the Open-cIS application is notable for its
ability to provide true multi-company, multi-receivable,
and multi-jurisdiction billing functionality. Built upon
a flexible and scalable three-tiered platform and including
integrated browser technology the open, well-documented
Component Object Model (COM) architecture easily integrates
with other NWP applications.
The strengths of the Open-cIS application are a clear advantage
to outsourcing services provider Accenture in serving its
newest customer. Open-cIS, however, also presents a challenge
for the company as it has not received market acceptance
beyond its parent-fed incubation environment. In the utility
municipal and mid-market space, UtiliPoint® has seen
other cutting-edge technology providers like Innoprise gain
the increasing confidence of its customers and the market,
signing up both new and additional deals, and migrating
new functionality to its application. Especially in the
municipal and mid-market, UtiliPoint research shows that
there is strong opportunity for new players and new platforms.
UtiliPoint® has not learned from Accenture whether
the company intends to use the Open-cIS application as a
platform for other outsourcing deals. According to UtiliPoint®
research and calculation, Accenture likely has more than
$350 million per year in revenue from utility IT, business
process management and business process outsourcing. So
far, the company has not announced any specific strategy
of a move toward concentrating outsourcing service on any
particular platform or set of platforms. However, in the
dynamic and quickly maturing market game of winning utility
outsourcing customers and keeping them happy, it will be
interesting to see what is next for Accenture and the other
leading players in the North American utility outsourcing
market.
