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Tarka
Power lines and a pylon against a pale grey-green sky

99.95%,

Running an energy utility's customer systems around the clock

24x7 managed services for an energy utility's customer systems.

The context

The utility's customer systems covered billing, the customer portal, smart meter data and the contact centre's CRM. Support was split between three vendors with separate contracts, and major incidents turned into arguments over ownership. Availability for the portal and billing had averaged 99.2% over the previous year.

The utility wanted a single partner accountable for the whole estate, around the clock, under a clear SLA. It also wanted more than ticket handling: the platforms were ageing, and the IT team needed someone who would reduce incident volume rather than simply process it.

High-voltage substation equipment with green insulators against a pale sky

What we did

  1. 1

    Assess and transition

    We spent four weeks on a service assessment: incident history, runbooks, monitoring gaps and single points of failure. Transition from the three incumbent vendors ran over eight weeks, with shadow and reverse-shadow periods before we took full ownership.

  2. 2

    One view of the estate

    We consolidated monitoring into a single observability stack with service-level objectives for each customer-facing system. Alerts route to the 24x7 operations pod with runbooks attached, and every major incident gets a blameless review within five working days.

  3. 3

    Fix the repeat offenders

    Problem management targets the incidents that recur. We moved the portal off end-of-life application servers into containers, automated certificate renewals and database failover tests, and retired the batch jobs behind most overnight billing failures.

  4. 4

    Quarterly improvement reviews

    Every quarter we bring the utility's IT leadership a short list of improvements, each with its expected effect on incidents, cost or risk. The SLA report is an appendix; the discussion is about what to change next.

The result

99.95%.

Platform availability

Availability across the customer-facing systems has held at 99.95% over two years, against 99.2% in the year before we took over. It is measured by external synthetic checks on the portal and billing services, not internal uptime counters, and reported monthly.

Monthly P1 and P2 incidents have fallen by more than half, and the utility now manages one contract instead of three. The quarterly reviews have driven more change than the SLA ever asked for: the portal move to containers started as one of them.

operations cover under one SLA
24x7
support contracts consolidated
3 to 1
fewer P1 and P2 incidents
55%
“Two years into managed services, they still bring us improvement ideas every quarter, not just ticket counts. The SLA is rarely the conversation.”
Portrait of Hannah BrooksHannah BrooksDirector of IT, an energy utility

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