E.ON UK

Supporting a Customer Base that Doubled Overnight

E.ON UK is the UK’s largest integrated energy company, generating and distributing electricity, and retailing electricity and gas. It is part of the E.ON group, the world’s largest investor-owned energy services provider.

Customer Challenges

Support twice as many customers quickly
Identify operational changes for expanded data center
Deliver service seamlessly

Solution

E.ON UK migrated to Sun Fire servers and used Sun Ready Availability Assessment services along with onsite services to accelerate process improvement and skill acquisition.

Business Results

Reduced support costs by US$1.4 million
Improved services delivery
Established baseline metrics for improving efficiency
Reduced risk
Accelerated process maturation

Products and Services

Sun Fire 15K Server
Sun Net Connect Services
SunReady Availability Assessment Service
Sun Proactive Technical Analyst

Story Details

When E.ON UK acquired TXU, a U.S.-based energy company with operations in the United Kingdom, E.ON UK’s customer base more than doubled overnight to nine million customers. An internal audit showed that the IBM SP2 server running E.ON UK’s business-to-business system for billing electricity could not handle the increased traffic without serious service degradation. After an extensive evaluation of servers from a number of vendors, E.ON UK decided to replace its IBM server with two Sun Fire 15K servers. A key reason for choosing Sun is the ability of Sun Fire 15K servers to expand the number of processors as the company’s customer base grows.

" The ongoing commitment of our Sun team as well as their in-depth understanding of E.ON UK people and processes has been instrumental in identifying and supporting improvement. "

— Carl Langton, Services and Architecture Manager, E.ON UK

E.ON UK management faced a number of challenges with its IT infrastructure, including ensuring adequate skills levels for the IT staff and enhancing change control for internal processes. To help E.ON UK address the operational side of the data center, Sun bundled a Sun Ready Availability Assessment with the Sun Fire 15K servers. Sun consultants installed Sun Remote Services Net Connect, which gave E.ON UK’s operations team a consistent view of the IT infrastructure’s performance and risks. Using Sun Remote Services Net Connect, Sun consultants helped E.ON UK develop comprehensive operational risk indices, as well as a baseline performance metric for operational efficiency. A Sun Proactive Technical Analyst (PTA) remained onsite at E.ON UK to help prioritize the changes required to drive operational processes to proficiency levels. “IT service management and operational efficiency is obviously part of Sun’s core competence,” says Karen Morris, Operations Manager at E.ON UK. “We benefited greatly from the presence of the Sun Proactive Technical Analyst, who provided significant support in helping us to drive our operational and process improvement.”

E.ON UK has reaped tangible benefits, including improved levels of service delivery, reduced operational risks, and substantial cost savings—E.ON UK has saved US$1.4 million in support costs based on higher operational quality. The company cites Sun’s dedication to high-quality service as a major factor in the gains. With Sun’s assessment and assistance, E.ON UK is now more confident that it can achieve higher operational efficiency while driving process maturation. E.ON UK also successfully integrated TXU’s customer base and delivered service and billing statements without negatively impacting overall operations. “The Sun Ready Availability Assessment gave us quantifiable and repeatable metrics for measuring operational performance,” says Morris. “We can build on this set of metrics and reach higher goals of operational efficiency and process maturation.”