Australian utilities look to NZ for billing software

By ADAM GIFFORD

Australian power companies are turning to New Zealand utility billing software vendors as they upgrade their systems for a deregulated market.

Peace Software has just signed an agreement with Central Energy to roll out its Energy suite to manage Central's 750,000 customers across regional New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.

And Spectrum Resources subsidiary Kinetiq has sold its PV2 billing product to Victorian energy distribution company TXU Networks, which has more than 500,000 customers.

Kinetiq has also strengthened its position in the Canadian market, buying its local distributor and integrator, Utility Settlement Ontario.

Peace chief executive Brian Peace said the connection with Central Energy dated to 1994, when Peace made its first export sale to Ophir Electricity, which had 25,000 customers around the town of Orange.

In the first round of industry restructuring soon after, Ophir merged with four other central NSW utilities to form Advance Energy, which has about 140,000 customers.

"We built a lot of our early web capability for Advance, particularly around the high-end customers," Mr Peace said.

That helped Advance win to several big industrial customers, including Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP).

Central chief executive Craig Murray said that because of the way the energy industry worked in Australia, IT was the only area in which the merged companies could make big savings.

The five-year deal was worth "more than $A10 million".

Mr Peace said the relationship with the Australian company helped Peace to try ideas, which flowed into its work with its North American customers.

Peace was also planning to undertake some joint-venture development with Central Energy.

Peace now has 355 staff, and another 35 are due to join the company before the end of the year.

Development is done in Auckland, but the company has opened a sales and support centre in Sydney, and is also working with the IBM development laboratory in Sydney to modify Energy to run on IBM hardware.