Y2K: Peace confident software fits the bill

By Adam Gifford

While many people are worried that the lights will go off on January 1, 2000, Brian Peace believes billing and customer information software are likely to give power utilities the real headaches.

"If there is ever a system with numerous date calculations, it's billing and customer information. Especially billing, which is continually calculating consumption based on date," said the managing director of Auckland-based company, Peace Software.

Year 2000 is an opportunity for which Peace Software has been preparing for several years, developing fully-compliant versions of its Energy product and hiring more developers, service and marketing staff ready for a full-out attack on the North American market.

Mr Peace said more than 80 per cent of North American utilities use legacy systems or solutions developed in-house. The pressure is on for them to get new software, not just because of Y2K but because of deregulation and the desire to embrace electronic commerce.

"As we approach the year 2000, existing systems will be tested for Y2K compliance. We think a lot of systems will fail that test. They will be looking for package solutions which can be wheeled in very quickly which are highly flexible and which can be up and running very rapidly."

Peace Software has proved it can install its Energy system in a matter of months, giving it a phenomenal advantage in the US where implementations are measured in years.

Mr Peace said many companies will patch up their existing systems to get them over the century roll over. As mistakes start to creep in, patches will be put on patches.

"The worst possible case is the problem you don't know about. What happens is you pass the 2000 date and the system works fine, and then you do end-of-month processing, so that's 30 days down the track. And then you get a problem, you don't know where, it's in the system somewhere."

Mr Peace said a major difference between Peace Software and many of its competitors is Energy is delivered as a single product.

"Why is that so important? A lot of suppliers deliver systems which are bespoke. That means they've taken the last cut of software delivered to previous customer, done a gap analysis of what they need to do for the next customer, done the changes, installed it and got on to the next job.

"It may be called the same name, but it ain't the same product.

"When it comes to year 2000, the supplier must go to each one of those sites and make sure it is compliant.

"Each time you touch code you are in danger of creating a bug. So you may be doing the same changes but creating totally different bugs on each site.

The other side of the triangle is third-party software.

"When you are delivering highly complex software like billing and customer information systems, you are interfacing with a whole host of other systems like electronic meter reading systems, bill printing systems, financials, asset management.

"You must make sure you have a standard interface which is year 2000 compliant or the people you are interfacing with are year 2000 compliant.

"You almost need to write code to test that interface on an ongoing basis so you don't accept any data into your system which has not, in some way, gone through that process."