Power & Utilities: Customer Stories

Mexico’s electrical utility—Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE)—faced higher costs, a difficult economy, and an increasingly complex mix of sources from which to generate power. To factor these and other variables into its decisions, CFE wanted a business intelligence (BI) solution for its energy generation infrastructure unit, CENACE (Centro Nacional de Control de Energía). That solution needed to offer timely information, the potential for company-wide use, and integrated tools for collaboration and communication. CENACE now has that solution, thanks to OSIsoft and Microsoft technologies. Executives and managers gain more, and more current, BI in less time than was needed before. Improved decision-making could save CFE U.S.$4.7 million per year; and IT staff can be redeployed to create self-service BI applications that magnify the benefits of the solution throughout the company.

To better weather the economic downturn that began in 2007, Constellation Energy set out to trim costs. It decided to consolidate its Web software vendors and standardize on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the software foundation for all its Web properties: 30 public sites, 5,000 internal sites, the employee portal, and a records management system. The move will reduce software licensing costs by more than U.S.$1 million over the next five years. Constellation will also be able to more easily link its Web sites to business applications, to offer new services, and incorporate new social-computing features such as blogs and wikis. Business users will publish and locate information more easily using enhanced content publishing and search capabilities, which will improve agility. Improved auditing and reporting features also will ease regulatory compliance.

Constellation Energy supplies energy products and services to wholesale, retail, commercial, industrial, and governmental customers in the United States and Canada. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, the company owns a diversified fleet of generating units located throughout the United States, and is among the leaders pursuing the development of new nuclear plants in the United States. Having expanded rapidly over the past few years, Constellation Energy outgrew its Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 environment and experienced slow delivery times and frequent outages. The company decided to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Constellation Energy is taking advantage of richer features, such as built-in clustering and replication. Using the innovative solution, the company plans to reduce administration costs and improve e-mail performance.

DTEK, a vertically integrated Ukrainian power company, needed to boost efficiency, data access, and system availability. It also wanted to consolidate disparate systems and simplify business processes. With the help of Microsoft Services, DTEK deployed a centralized IT solution built with the Microsoft platform including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. The new architecture includes clustered databases with 9 terabytes of data, virtual servers built with Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 R2, and SAP business applications. The company is also implementing rules-based system management processes with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. As a result, DTEK expects to reduce downtime by 20 percent, cut maintenance costs by 25 percent, and decrease support costs by 85 percent. DTEK also expects to increase productivity and IT scalability, flexibility, and agility.

DTEK, a group of 20 diverse energy companies in Eastern Ukraine, strives for leadership in the European energy market by implementing advanced technologies to improve production and management processes. In 2009, the company launched an information technology development initiative to upgrade the IT infrastructure and standardize employee workstations. DTEK deployed the Windows 7 Enterprise operating system along with Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. As a result, DTEK can deploy workstations in half the time, IT service requests have decreased by 20 percent, and the company has gained 2,500 hours a year through enhanced productivity.

Global power and gas giant E.ON needed to update and standardize its desktop operating system. The company decided to upgrade 85,000 computers to the Windows 7 operating system, using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for the deployment. With Windows 7, E.ON expects to cut operating costs by up to 30 percent, reduce licensing costs by up to 15 percent, enhance security management, and reduce system maintenance.

Edipower, one of Italy’s major energy providers, requires continuously reliable information systems to integrate its services, support its business processes, and generate and distribute energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But as the company’s IT infrastructure grew to 120 servers, it became complex and difficult to manage. Edipower wanted to cut IT management costs, reduce the number of physical servers it operated, and optimize system flexibility to best serve its business requirements. Using the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology, the company consolidated its server environment and streamlined the deployment of new services. By developing its virtualized infrastructure, Edipower has lowered costs, reduced downtime, saved energy, optimized 24-hour information services, and aligned its IT processes to its business goals.

Energy Northwest is a leader in energy generation technologies. Its projects produce enough power for one million Washington homes. The agency relies heavily on e-mail for binding business communications and storing critical information. With an aging e-mail system, Energy Northwest employees did not have access to the most up-to-date communications tools, and maintenance and failure recovery were slow and labor-intensive. Energy Northwest deployed a new solution based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Management features such as the ability to grant more precise permissions will save administrators several hours each week, and expanded communications tools in Microsoft Outlook Web App help employees work more productively. The agency also uses a Database Availability Group to achieve site resiliency and improve availability. It has shortened recovery time to 30 seconds or less.

Entergy, a Fortune 500 company with 14,300 employees, produces and delivers electric power to 2.7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. The company has captured trillions of records from its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and its more than 320,000 SCADA objects. To better extract value from SCADA data, the utility deployed a real-time data storage application, called Pegasus RDS™, which was created by Microsoft® partner Nobadeer Software, Inc. using the Microsoft Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® and Microsoft Visual Studio®. The solution, which manages trillions of records, will soon be upgraded to SQL Server 2008. Pegasus RDS gives Entergy numerous benefits including a better view into its data which helps the utility to identify potential problems early so it can act proactively to protect its electrical grid.

Just Energy is a leading independent energy supplier with more than 1.5 million electricity and natural gas customer accounts in North America. To accommodate a growing need for improved business continuity and real-time access to data, the company wanted to minimize the costs associated with maintaining and developing its data infrastructure. After analyzing various IT options, Just Energy determined that creating a data management platform based on Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 would represent a cost-effective method to improve its data compression and warehousing capabilities. Today, the company is using SQL Server® 2008 to operate within a cost-effective, secure and scalable IT infrastructure that features strong server consolidation and a higher availability of corporate data.

The Public Power Corporation (PPC), the largest business in Greece, provides 93 percent of the country’s power. To reduce operating costs and improve user productivity, PPC is upgrading as many of its 4,200 client computers as are hardware-capable to the Windows 7 operating system. PPC expects to reduce IT costs and improve user productivity by speeding computer deployments, and to trim energy consumption with power management features.

Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), an energy utility, wanted to upgrade its intranet solution to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for greater scalability. The company attended a Strategy Briefing and an Architecture Design Session at a Microsoft Technology Center, where it learned about design structure. Thanks to those visits, PSEG improved its design, shortened its project timeline, and avoided risk, ensuring a successful project.

As Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) embarked on a large-scale project to replace its aging desktop computer environment of 17,000 computers, the utility leader also decided to upgrade its operating system to help resolve ongoing application compatibility issues. SEC has begun upgrading to the Windows 7 Enterprise operating system and is already experiencing improved business continuity, simplified IT maintenance, and improved employee productivity.

Through merger, Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) maintained separate IT organizations that ran IT at the component level rather than as a true service. Company management, however, realized the benefits of running IT as a single, services-focused organization. To accomplish this, management called on the benefits of Premier Support and took part in a Roles and Knowledge Management engagement to facilitate the effective adoption of the Microsoft Operations Framework. Through Roles and Knowledge Management, SEC has successful established IT as a service while improving productivity, service quality, systems availability, accountability, business alignment, and innovation.

Severn Trent Water wanted its information to flow as smoothly as the water it delivered daily to millions of customers in the United Kingdom. Its existing systems had grown organically over time; now it was time to adopt a single, strategic direction. For a new content management and collaboration platform, the company chose Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 over an update to its IBM Lotus Notes deployment and aging intranet, based on WebSphere. The results: the company’s intranet is expected to publish more content more quickly, while saving editors time that they can use to boost the quality of content. Collaboration tools will foster greater innovation. And the new technology supports a broader drive to modernise the ways that employees use and share information.

TECO Energy is a Fortune 1000 energy company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. TECO Energy's business units include Tampa Electric, a regulated electric utility serving nearly 667,000 customers in West Central Florida; Peoples Gas System, Florida's largest natural gas distribution utility; TECO Coal, producer of coal in Kentucky and Virginia; and TECO Guatemala, which owns two power plants and has an interest in Guatemala's largest distribution utility.

Transelectrica is a power-grid company in Romania. To ensure the reliability of the power system, the company prides itself on continuously improving its IT infrastructure. In an effort to streamline information access at branch offices, the company upgraded to the Windows® 7 operating system. Transelectrica now benefits from streamlined access to corporate resources, easier IT management, enhanced security, and improved system performance.

Determined to offer more innovative solutions to customers, Germany-based energy supplier Yello Strom used the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 development system to build online services that help customers track and control energy consumption in their own homes.