Guernsey Electricity cuts application costs by 70% with Micro Focus
Utilities provider saves £120,000 through effective mainframe migration
NEWBURY, England, 26 February 2009 – Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernisation solutions, today announced that a mainframe migration project has been completed by Guernsey Electricity using Micro Focus technology, which will reduce application operating costs by 70%. The company, which is the sole provider of electrical power on the island of Guernsey, expects to save around £120,000 each year, equivalent to 10% of its entire annual IT budget.
Guernsey Electricity (GEL) needed to reduce its dependence upon increasingly scarce ICL mainframe skills, whilst at the same time cut costs and increase performance, and elected to migrate its core business applications from a mainframe to a modern Windows environment. The Channel Island utility provider’s business-critical MIDAS application, the primary source of customer information used by up to 150 GEL employees each day, had been developed in-house in ICL ApplicationMaster and COBOL. Having found that MIDAS’ functionality remained popular with users, the company used Micro Focus’ Net Express with .NET and Server Express for .NET along with consultancy and software tools from Blue Phoenix, to successfully migrate the system to Windows without any change to end-user functionality.
In addition to reducing costs and achieving its primary aim of reducing the need for niche mainframe skills, the project has also improved batch performance, reducing run times by 50%. The move to a modern, industry standard platform will also provide GEL with greater flexibility moving forward, with major developments to its MIDAS system now taking a matter of hours, rather than weeks, to complete.
David Elliston, IT Services Manager, Guernsey Electricity, said: “The cost savings yielded by this project have freed-up additional IT budget which can now be used to improve other areas of our IT systems. Micro Focus’ powerful Windows-based development tools enabled us to move to an open, modern environment while preserving our unique business logic and eliminating the need for scarce proprietary system skills.”
“This migration successfully met all of its key aims, and surpassed expectations in a number of areas” added Stuart McGill, CTO, Micro Focus. “With IT budgets likely to shrink in 2009, modernisation projects such as these can help organisations to extract maximum possible value from their existing IT assets.”
About Micro Focus
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com
Net Express for .NET and Server Express for.NET are registered trademarks of Micro Focus.
About Guernsey Electricity
Guernsey Electricity Limited is a limited liability company wholly owned by the local government, the States of Guernsey. The company is the sole provider of electrical energy to the island of Guernsey operating under the Electricity (Guernsey) Law 2001. Guernsey Electricity has been providing electricity to the island for over one hundred years. Until 2001 all electricity was generated on-island but since then completion of a cable link to France via Jersey has given the opportunity to import units from the European Grid in conjunction with on-island generation. The change has brought significant environmental benefits for the Island while improving the company's risk profile
