As a highly successful growth company, Venture Production plc, now Centrica Energy (Upstream) had an organically grown IT infrastructure, which was failing to deliver basic levels of performance. Venture had a business model based on an entrepreneurial, low cost, high performance approach to realising stranded oil and gas reserves. Culturally, it needed a similar philosophy for IT service.
The acquisitions of Venture Production plc (Venture) and a 20% equity stake in British Energy transformed the Centrica Group, creating an upstream division that is now a growth business in its own right. The Group is now positioned to be able to target investment in areas of greatest return, while remaining at the centre of ensuring security of supply for the UK.
The Challenge
In 2007 Intersum was challenged by Venture Production to build a 21cn infrastructure and provide a top quartile Oil & Gas IT service with 99.95% availability and built in flexibility for future mergers and acquisitions.
The Project
Intersum designed and implemented a new server room whilst simultaneously running the original Venture Production domain. A new domain based on a Windows 2003 active directory was created and a new structure was implemented. Users, applications and data were then migrated to the new domain and a new common operating environment was completed. Once the migration was completed, new key performance indicators were identified and agreed with Venture as a basis for performance management.
New and up to date technologies were implemented including:
- SAN/NetApp Infrastructure
- Microsoft Exchange Cluster
- Citrix XenApp 6
- Disaster Recovery/ Double Take NetApp
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010
- Office 2007/2010
Venture benefited from an excellent, AUPEC audited, top quartile service from Intersum. Following the merger of VP and Centrica Energy Upstream, CEU has now become Intersum’s customer. Forming part of Centrica Group, CEU had an immediate requirement to be able to connect the original Venture infrastructure to CEU.
The End Result
- 100% KPI Performance For 2010
- 99.94% Availability
- Top Quartile AUPEC Audit
- Tested DR Performance
- Proven M&A Flexibility
Intersum’s innovative performance based Service Contract means that all projects and change management is included in an easily predictable package. Our bonus driven culture has ensured continual innovation and improvement for CEU and prompted the following comments from Chris Bird, Centrica Energy (Upstream) Technical Director.
“Intersum has done a tremendous job for Centrica Energy (Upstream) over the last few years. We now have a state of the art IT/IS system, disaster recovery package and excellent feedback from the end users. However with the recent benchmarking we achieved top quartile performance including costs. On a personal note John Gillies has been extremely supportive and very open which has allowed us to have the right conversations which has resulted in quick and effective business decisions being made and value to be created. I really enjoy working with Intersum, as it is more of a partnership where we both challenge each other and the resultant is really greater than the sum of the parts. I hope Intersum continue to go from strength to strength.”
