2 page Case Study - Posted 9/7/2007

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EDF Energy

Infrastructure Optimization Opens New IT and Business Possibilities for EDF Energy

EDF Energy, one of the largest energy companies in the UK, employs over 13,000 people and supplies energy to approximately 5.5 million customers. After the utilities industry was deregulated and privatized in the UK four years ago, EDF Energy was formed from the acquisition of three separate companies. After these mergers, EDF Energy faced the challenge of consolidating three distinct IT infrastructures into one unified platform. To address these issues, EDF Energy partnered with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Computacenter Services, a leading IT infrastructure service provider in Europe. By capitalizing on the Core IO model, EDF Energy now has a unified and more agile IT infrastructure that can effectively deliver continuous improvements to its business.

Situation

EDF Energy, one of the largest energy companies in the UK, employs over 13,000 people and supplies energy to approximately 5.5 million customers. EDF Energy is the largest electricity supplier for London, the southeast and the southwest of England. It operates coal-fired and gas-fired power stations, private combined heat and power plants, and wind farms.

Now that we have a standardized platform, we have increased agility with our infrastructure and more transparencyinto costs. This has enabled us to manage our IT assets more efficiently and effectively. Keith Funnel Client Computing Manager EDF Energy

“EDF Energy needed a standardized, agile infrastructure and uniform processes in order to proactively manage its IT assets, and deliver continuous improvements and high quality services to the business units,” states Simon Oecken, Distributed Computing Solutions Unit Director, Computacenter Services. In the deregulated, intensely competitive landscape of the utilities industry, these optimization steps were critical to enable its people to drive business growth.

Promoting a number of environmental initiatives, EDF Energy wanted to ensure its IT infrastructure was as “green” as possible by reducing its energy consumption and by enhancing communication solutions to decrease employee travel and fuel consumption.

Solution

To address these issues, EDF Energy partnered with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Computacenter Services, a leading IT infrastructure service provider in Europe. Computacenter Services was tasked with consolidating and standardizing EDF Energy’s infrastructure into one unified platform while reducing IT costs through a series of IT initiatives under its managed services contract.

Computacenter Services assessed EDF Energy’s disparate systems and identified a number of initiatives to better optimize its infrastructure. These included:

Completed over an 18 month period
• Standardizing the desktop on a single image using the Microsoft Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) operating system.
• Standardizing directory services to Microsoft Active Directory® on the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 R2 operating system.

Underway
• Automating service pack updates and patch management.
• Implementing Remote Support and Remote Control.

One of the challenges was standardizing EDF Energy’s disparate desktop operating systems. The heterogeneous environment included: Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT® 4. Computacenter Services recommended that EDF Energy standardize most of its 10,500 desktops and 2,500 laptops on Windows XP SP2. Due to a dependency on third party application upgrades, a small percentage of legacy Windows NT 4 desktops remain.

During the upgrade process, Computacenter Services used Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization to successfully resolve legacy conflict issues, making this large project much easier. The proactive security technologies and enhanced security infrastructure in Windows XP SP2 now provide increased manageability and control for the IT staff.

EDF Energy’s mix of directory services included Novell, Netware Directory Services and Active Directory. These were all migrated to Active Directory along with the roll-out of Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.

Security vulnerabilities were also a major concern for EDF Energy. Computacenter Services focused on automating updates to mitigate security risks and to improve maintenance management. Not only were the previous manual processes timeconsuming and costly, but also it was difficult to keep track of which computer had what set of patches. With a more optimized infrastructure now in place, more than a thousand attempted viruses were prevented from breaching EDF Energy’s IT environment in the past 12 months.

Additional platform standardization occurred with the deployments of Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard and Enterprise Editions, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2.

By consolidating servers (80 were eliminated) and migrating to Windows Server 2003 64-Bit Edition in some instances, EDF Energy is reducing its carbon footprint by using fewer servers and less power. These efforts not only help to further optimize the IT infrastructure, but also support the company’s environmental initiatives.

To enhance employee productivity, EDF Energy’s mobility solutions use the Remote Access and Remote Control technologies in Windows Server 2003 R2. Approximately 500 employees now check e-mail and log on to the corporate network each day to complete work at home or in mobile locations such as different branch offices.

To support this work, Computacenter Services utilized the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization (IO) model and its proven methodologies to measure progress, help prioritize future work, and to provide clarity and business value to EDF Energy at certain key reference points.

By using the Core IO model, they discovered that EDF Energy was in a fairly mature state in a number of areas due the initiatives Computacenter Services had completed by that time. This led to customer conversations about what else could be done to extend the benefits EDF Energy is receiving from its infrastructure.

One area of opportunity identified was in communication and collaboration—part of the Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization model (BPIO). BPIO conversations centered on how a unified communication strategy could boost employee productivity, save money, and reduce business travel—key to EDF Energy’s conservation initiatives. Currently, EDF Energy does not have an internal solution in place for Web conferencing, video or VoIP-enabled communication. Instead, it maintains contracts with multiple companies to host these services on an ad-hoc basis. This out-sourced solution does not readily support daily, on-demand needs, nor is it cost-effective. Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 was introduced as a possible solution to meet EDF Energy’s objectives. As a result of these BPIO discussions, EDF Energy is now participating in the OCS 2007 Technology Adoption Program and has an OCS beta pilot program underway.

Benefits

By capitalizing on the Core IO model, EDF Energy now has a unified and more agile IT infrastructure that can effectively deliver continuous improvements to its business.

Unified Platform Reduces IT Support Costs
EDF Energy’s optimized infrastructure has enabled the company to move away from manual IT processes. Implementing automated procedures not only saves money but also allows the IT staff to focus on more strategic projects. The more agile and unified infrastructure also works more efficiently, resulting in significant cost-deferrals. “We can now do more, with less,” says Keith Funnell, Client Computing Manager, EDF Energy. EDF Energy is in discussions about a contract extension with Computacenter Services. The extension will focus on enhancing service levels, improving quality, improving customer satisfaction, and enabling committed cost reduction. Overall, Computacenter Services estimates that EDF Energy’s IT maintenance costs have been reduced by 15 percent since it began its managed services contract.

Simplified Management Increases Efficiencies
The company’s standardized IT platform offers greater transparency across the spectrum of technologies, services and costs. This gives EDF Energy’s IT leadership improved insight, and simplifies ongoing management and the resolution of issues. One example is with first-time fix rates. When an employee encounters a computer problem and calls the helpdesk, first-time fix rates for Computacenter managed calls have improved from 35 to 62 percent on average. This is a direct result of the optimization solutions implemented to date.

IT Environment Shifts from Reactive to Agile
A key tenet of the Microsoft IO model focuses on the adoption and implementation of proven methodologies and best practices to help optimize the performance and utilization of deployed technologies. Proactive measures, such as ongoing maintenance and change management processes, were also implemented to prevent and reduce the risk of issues occurring in the first place.

EDF Energy’s Keith Funnell says, “Before, we learned about a problem after the end user was impacted. With the right processes and tools now in place we can move forward to implement proactive performance monitoring so that issues can be identified before they become user impacting.”

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