Energy UK Trade Body Outsources IT To Zhero
When three energy trade bodies merged to form Energy UK, the organisation outsourced its IT to Zhero to cut costs and modernise legacy systems.The creation of trade body Energy UK merged three separate organisations and outsourced IT to cut costs and modernise legacy systems. The Association of Electricity Producers, the Energy Retail Association and the UK Business Council for Sustainable Energy merged to become Energy UK in 2012. The organisation’s members generate more than 90% of the UK’s total electricity output, supplying more than 26 million homes. Lesley McLeod, head of public affairs at Energy UK, said the biggest challenge was to bring the separate organisations together in one place. She said the organisations’ IT comprised a number of legacy systems, which were not easy to replace because of their business criticality“Every organisation had its own systems. It might have appeared that the best thing to do would be to start again – but there was too much important information in the systems we had,” said McLeod. This included membership information, she said.
She said the organisation decided to outsource its IT, to cut costs and update the infrastructure. She said the organisation did not have a large IT team, so the decision to outsource was simple.
The company selected IT services supplier Zhero to run IT. McLeod said the supplier’s existing relationship with the Association of Electricity Producers (AEP) was key to its choice.
The merged organisations’ IT systems were migrated onto AEP’s IT platform. Zhero helped the merging organisations migrate their separate IT systems onto the single platform, which included unifying all communication systems.
Zhero which provides Energy UK with a 24-hour IT helpdesk, direct-to-engineer support, management and monitoring for Energy UK users’ workstations, servers, firewalls and WiFi. Zhero manages the hardware, software procurement and licences.
Zhero made front page news with customer Energy UK. Take a look here.