Auckland firm takes big step toward world Peace

By ADAM GIFFORD

IBM has brought in Peace Software to provide a complete billing system for the fifth-largest United States electric power retailer, Colorado-based Xcel.

IBM Global Services has a $US980 million ($2.4 billion), 11-year contract with Xcel, which provides power to 3.5 million customers in 12 states.

Peace licenses its software according to customer numbers, so the deal it is a significant boost for the Auckland-based company, as is the relationship with IBM, which is creating a national centre for excellence around the project.

"We see this as ... growing to enable us to deploy our product anywhere in the world through an IBM channel," chief executive Brian Peace said.

IBM senior project executive Raymond Gogel said IBM saw Peace playing a potential global role.

"This will be the watershed event to prove what's there, because it's a huge implementation."

Dr Gogel said Xcel, formerly Public Service of Colorado, had grown rapidly since 1995, merging with large utilities in Texas and Minnesota.

Its generation capacity was 17,000 megawatts, compared with New Zealand's total generating capacity of about 8700 megawatts.



Xcel was readying itself for deregulation, and wanted to replace existing systems.

Dr Gogel said Peace had come out of nowhere into the North American market. "What Brian and his team have done is start with the customer and design with the web in mind, not simply as an add-on. "

He said it allowed customers to move from a call centre focus to one where there were multiple channels, from which to select.

Peace will start installing its Energy software in Xcel next month, and aims to having it working when the state deregulates next January.

The mainframe legacy system running Xcel's Colorado operations is due to be phased out by August 2002, and a client server system which runs the Minnesota operation is due to be replaced by April 2003.

Peace has 15 people on site in Denver, but that number should double before the project finishes.

Twelve IBM staff have been trained in New Zealand and are now certified on the product.

The Energy application will be hosted on Sun E10000 servers.

Peace now has 320 staff, including 200 in Auckland, the base for development.