Peace Software cracks Irish market

Sebastian Gunningham says the deal has opened up new prospects in Europe. Picture / Martin Sykes

Utility billing specialist Peace Software has broken into the European market, selling its Peace 8 customer information system (CIS) to Irish electricity generator and retailer Airtricity.

Peace chief executive Sebastian Gunningham said Airtricity generated its electricity from huge wind farms in Ireland and off the coast of Scotland, and sold to about 38,000 Irish businesses on both sides of the border.

Peace had looked for a customer in Europe for about four years, but avoided deals that were too small or would have required extensive customisation.

"Airtricity is an aggressive and growing business, and for us it hits the sweet spot for our product, which is built for deregulating and restructuring markets."

The company did not disclose the value of the deal, but said it was in the multimillion-dollar range.

All Republic of Ireland residents have been able to choose their electricity retailer since February. The business market is deregulated in Northern Ireland, with full deregulation due in 2007.

Airtricity Supply chief executive Mark Ennis said Peace 8 offered the most appropriate and richest functionality for his company to compete against the incumbents.

Gunningham said that while the deal was not one of the biggest around, "Europe is very much a reference buyer, and we are already getting new prospects because of it".

Peace beat major vendors, including SAP.

"All we do is CIS. We do CIS in the morning, we do it in the afternoon, we think about it when we go to bed."

Airtricity's response, Gunningham said, was: "That's good, because all we have is a CIS problem."

A team of 10 is in Dublin installing the software, and the project is expected to go live before the end of the year.

"While the number of customers is small, the application is very complex, with lots of billing rules and market regulations to write in. We are doing it all ourselves, because Airtricity did not want an integrator," Gunningham said.

Airtricity will use Peace 8 for billing, overseeing market transactions, signing up new customers, delivering customer care through its call centre and providing customers with online access to their accounts.

Peace last month cut its Auckland development team by 54 staff.

"About 100 people seems the right size for a development operation," Gunningham said. "Software is a factory system where smaller factories are much more efficient."