Peace close to top of bill

By ADAM GIFFORD

Utility billing software company Peace is among the world's best in its field, says IT research firm Meta Group.

Its draft assessment of providers of customer information systems (CIS) software to the energy sector has come up with no clear leader, but puts New Zealand-based Peace in the leading cluster, alongside German software giant SAP and industry specialist SPL Worldgroup.

Dr Zarko Sumic, Meta's vice-president of energy information strategies, said only the top eight of the 50-plus companies making utility CIS software were included in the in-depth assessment.

He said the energy industry used to be stodgy, vertically integrated and slow-moving, but deregulation or the threat of deregulation had transformed it. Different types of companies were emerging in the generation, distribution and retailing of energy, all with specific IT needs.

Meta rates companies based on performance and presence.

"Performance is measured through technology, features and functionality, architecture, scalability, ability to execute, financial viability," said Sumic.

"Presence is measured in vision, marketing, branding, market share, market awareness, partnerships, intellectual property."

Peace, which scored highly in several of the 60 categories, had a major competitive advantage from being based in Auckland.

"They are able to get high-quality people for less money."

The company rated "fair" for market share because it had yet to break through the barrier of 5 million customers billed.

By comparison, SAP has more than 100 sites and 100 million customers billed through its systems. SPL has been around for 20 years and could be considered one of the strongest incumbents, with about 50 million customers billed. But Sumic said Peace had "agility".

It was just a matter of time before the company's Energy software product covered the needs of regulated as well as deregulated companies, but its scalability could only be proved in the market.

The trend towards mergers and acquisitions meant billing systems would need to cope with up to 10 million customers.

"You need to be able to bill 5 per cent of customers every night, which means you need to be able to generate 500,000 bills nightly," said Sumic.

"That sort of system is not easy to create."

Peace

Meta Group