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GRTgaz: Establishing an agile, scalable IT infrastructure with Accenture Cloud Platform

Accenture helped GRTgaz lower its operating costs by 30 percent and greatly improve efficiencies by establishing an agile, scalable IT infrastructure using Accenture Cloud Platform.

Client profile

GRTgaz is the leading natural gas transmission system operator in France and one of the largest in Europe.
The company owns and operates the longest high-pressure natural gas transmission network in Europe. It also provides assessment and consulting services in the field of gas transmission in Europe, as well as other parts of the world.

Opportunity

To ensure optimum safety, reliability and cost effectiveness, GRTgaz delivers natural gas to clients directly connected to its transmission network. Major customers include industrial users, power plants that use natural gas to produce electricity, public distribution networks, and neighboring transmission networks.

The company’s customer relationship management (CRM), metering, billing and invoicing applications are critical to secure their revenues while taking into account the new regulations every year. However, GRTgaz was facing challenges in maintaining and testing its business-critical applications. Key issues included high IT costs due to use of physical data center infrastructure for part-time testing, low availability of testing environments, poor service levels, and inefficiency when provisioning new environments.

GRTgaz set out on a journey to shorten release cycles, improve application availability and service levels, and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Solution

GRTgaz selected Accenture to manage its testing environments, based on Accenture’s track record of successfully delivering system integration and application outsourcing projects for the company since 2009.
CEOs, CFOs and COOs recognize that their organizations must get fit and stay fit to compete amid several disruptive changes, such as rising costs, globalization and competition. It’s not about just cutting cost, success comes from reinvesting those savings in activities that will drive competitive advantage and revenue growth.

The scope included 15 applications across CRM, metering, billing and invoicing functions.

To reduce IT infrastructure spend and improve service levels, Accenture proposed moving GRTgaz’s testing environments from the company’s data center to public cloud hosted on the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP)—a centralized management control framework for brokering, orchestrating, managing, and governing enterprise cloud solutions.

The Accenture team implemented the cloud solution using its Global Delivery Network—with resources from the Delivery Center in Nantes, France, collaborating with experienced ACP professionals from the US.

Results

The company was also able to increase environment availability from 54 percent to 90 percent—a 34 point increase in availability, and significantly shortened the release cycle for its commercial applications by reducing the time taken to provision testing environments from 8–12 weeks to approximately 10 days. Due to Accenture’s involvement in driving the company’s infrastructure management and application development and maintenance, it has achieved 20 percent faster incident resolution during user acceptance testing phases and improved overall service levels. Encouraged by the successful migration of its testing environments on ACP, GRTgaz has subsequently migrated its development environments to the new infrastructure. The company is now considering moving its production environments to this platform, as well.
With Accenture’s help, GRTgaz was able to lower operational IT costs by 30 percent by leveraging cloud-based infrastructure for its testing environments.
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