Cloud migration helps Severn Trent Water save over £1m per year

Utility company Severn Trent Water is saving £1m per year, partly as a result of decommissioning its legacy billing system, known as CAST.

The decommissioning of other systems, and the mainframe which hosted them will make up the rest of the cost saving.

The process saw Severn Trent move its key historical billing data to software and services company Macro 4's online archive.

The archived data is presented on screens that mimic the layout of the original CAST application, and so are familiar to the firm's 50 customer service agents, who access the data during customer calls.

This project is part of a wider programme in which the company plans to decommission a series of legacy business applications across the organisation.

Many of these were replaced when the company rolled out its new SAP business software system in 2010.

"As is the case with many legacy business systems, we couldn't just switch our old billing application off without planning a migration," said Nichola Wilson, technical project manager at Severn Trent Water.

"It held around 700 million customer records which we needed to keep alive to address queries and potential disputes that can arise about historical billing activity. There's also a lot of valuable, historical information, including metre locations and other billing data that is helpful for operations personnel," she added.

Last year, Severn Trent Water used the Macro 4 document management system to support archiving from its SAP application.

It is archiving static and infrequently accessed SAP data to help control the growth of the database, ensure good performance levels and reduce operational costs.