Earlier this year, UK utility company United Utilities found itself needing to modernise its operations management system (OMS), the IT infrastructure that forms the administrative basis for the company’s electricity, water and wastewater networks.

The immediate goal was to help ensure regulatory compliance and improve customer service by upgrading back-end systems. But United also wanted to build a framework of methodologies and re-usable software tools that would put more scalability, flexibility and modularity into its systems.

To achieve this, the firm embarked on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) project, the initial stage of which involved tendering a contract to move its old applications off IBM mainframes, which were out of manufacturer support, and onto new mid-range servers.

Allan Nurney, United Utilities’ business systems architect, would not reveal the names of the companies who submitted bids for the contract, but said more than 20 companies replied to the first notification. From a shortlist of five
companies, IT services consultancy Infosys was eventually picked.

“The five were a mix of the major consultancies, offshore systems integrators and service providers. Infosys was selected on the basis that it had the right credentials and technical skills, offshore and onshore delivery capabilities, and a shared resource and competency centre with Microsoft,” explained Nurney. “Though, to be honest, we just found them to be a good set of people who were willing to be flexible.”

The support contract for the project is still under discussion, though there will not be an internal team to manage it as it progresses. United Utilities spent between £1m and £2m, including the cost of the servers, but believes the Infosys solution will pay for itself by helping the company save time and money when it comes to updating other systems in the future.

“The primary driver was the cost of getting those systems off legacy architectures ­ mainframes attract very high support costs, and it was important to remove United Utilities’ dependency on them. From the user perspective, it has been designed to be more intuitive, so there are benefits of reduced training,” said Nurney.

United has not taken the decision to roll out SOA across its entire IT infrastructure just yet, however. The OMS upgrade is still only part way through and is not expected to be complete until March next year.

“We are not specifically adopting an enterprise SOA across the whole company, but just a best practice distinction for this particular project,” explained Nurney. “A number of similar applications are likely to follow, though, most notably our work management and customer contact systems, also currently based on the mainframe computers. Infosys is a credible company, so we could do more work with it in the future. This was quite a complex project and Infosys has done extremely well,” he added.