Peace Software recently announced that Xcel Energy (Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.) and IBM Global Services (White Plains, New York, U.S.) have deployed the Peace Customer Information System (CIS) product for 1.5 million electricity and 1.2 million gas customers in six U.S. states. This achievement marks the largest multi-state commercial-off-the-shelf CIS installation in North America.

Formed in 2000 by the merger of New Century Energies (Denver, Colorado, U.S.) and Northern States Power Co. (Minneapolis), Xcel Energy inherited two legacy CIS systems from the predecessor companies. While both of these systems were Customer/1 systems, they were on different infrastructures, one mainframe and one client server. In 2002, Xcel Energy set forth to replace both legacy systems and consolidate all customers onto the browser-based Peace CIS for standardization and optimization of business processes, customer service and reporting.

IBM Global Services was the overall project manager and systems integrator for this complex implementation, which also included data conversion. As a result of the Peace CIS installation, Xcel Energy will have all of its customers in 11 states on one system.

The Peace CIS implementation project was divided into three phases, commencing in August 2003 with the conversion of 220,000 Colorado customers. In May 2004, 2.7 million customers in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming were consolidated onto Peace. The final phase involves converting the remaining 2.4 million northern territory customers onto Peace.
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