The Kenya Power Company and Kenya Power and Light - utilities providing generation, transmission, and distribution of electrical power to more than 250 000 businesses and individuals throughout Kenya - recently turned to Sun as their core IT platform. The platform involves Sun servers, Sun StorEdge storage products, and the Solaris operating environment as their core platform for key business applications such as enterprise software SAP R/3, customer service, and billing.
Kenya Power and Light reports the exceptional reliability and availability of the Sun platform is directly responsible for faster processes, better debt management, and unprecedented improvements needed to deliver effective customer service and to manage its internal business processes. In Kenya, customer service is very visible to the community at large and plays a prominent role in establishing a utility`s public image.
The Sun technology has been such a success that when the Kenya Power Company (KPC) split off from Kenya Power and Light (KP&L) in 1998, the new company turned to Sun as the primary computer vendor for its data centre, one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, and SAP R/3 platform. KPC is one the first companies in the world to receive shipment of Sun Enterprise 5500 servers.
When the utility started planning for its R/3 implementation in 1996, it realised it had to address the reliability of its computer infrastructure. "Before we starting dealing with Sun, we found our other vendors didn`t give us the support that we wanted on an ongoing basis," says James Kinuthia, director of information services for KP&L. "In addition, we were encountering a number of system failures."
Says Kinuthia: "Sun technology was doing an excellent job at the large United Nations facility here in Nairobi, and there was a highly competent reseller - Legend Technologies - close at hand. When we checked them out, their enthusiasm, professionalism, and knowledge impressed us." Plus, Sun technology met the utility`s selection criteria for reliability and openness - two more of the major selection criteria.
Based on the evaluation, KP&L decided to run a small scale pilot project on a Sun server SPARCserver 1000E as a development server and started to build a new financial management application in the R/3 environment. Following the success of this project, KP&L purchased a four-processor Sun Enterprise 4000 server as its production server for the R/3 environment and added a Sun StorEdge disk array for the 40 GB SAP database.
"Our Sun server performed extremely well; it never went down," Kinuthia says. "And we got tremendous support from Legend Technologies. When we were ready to acquire our production system for the R/3 applications, selecting Sun was a simple decision."
Spain`s Union Fenosa group, a passport customer of Sun, which operates a local subsidiary company in Kenya called Iberafrica, fulfilled the role of systems integrator for the total deal. They made significant contributions to the total application implementation, including SAP R/3, which benefited business process re-engineering and information systems at KP&L. KP&L went live in July 1997 with R/3 functionality for accounting, materials management, and human resources. Kinuthia particularly cites Sun`s "simple, friendly" architecture as an advantage that made the implementation process go smoothly because operators find it easy to learn and use. As a result, he is seeing very few problems in operations after the initial training.
Kinuthia believes the Sun Enterprise 4000 server is the right choice for his R/3 needs after using it in production. " It is very reliable, has the performance we need, and we continue to get excellent support."
That success continued to carry over when KPC split from KP&L in 1998 and took sole responsibility for the utilities` nine generating plants (seven hydroelectric, one geothermal, and one thermal). "With our track record so far, it`s obvious we would look at Sun to create our data centre at KPC, and our timing could hardly have been better," says Kinuthia. "Sun announced its Sun Enterprise 5500 servers as we were looking, and that was the answer, right there." Kinuthia continues by noting that KPC has acquired two Sun Enterprise 5500 servers and two internally mounted Sun StorEdge A5000 disk arrays. One Sun Enterprise 5500 server, equipped with 3 GB of memory and 100 GB of disk drive storage, is to be the production SAP R/3 server, and the other Sun Enterprise 5500 server, equipped with 1 GB memory and 50 GB of storage, is to be the development server.
"The Sun Enterprise 5500 servers and Sun StorEdge A5000 disk arrays are a great fit for us and offer excellent benefits. Two things stand out: price performance and the size the disk arrays we can mount internally. I can hardly believe how much performance we are getting for the money - they seem like a real bargain. And we can add more disk drive storage internal to the server if needed - that really simplifies our environment."
KPC also purchased the Sun StorEdge L1800 and the Sun StorEdge Enterprise Netbackup as remote, high volume backup for the Sun Enterprise 5500 servers. Future plans are to purchase another Sun Enterprise 5500 server and Sun StorEdge A5000 disk array for data warehousing needs.
There are more successes at KP&L than just R/3--the utility`s customer service and billing application is another example, where it previously took two to three days to process a batch of metre readings due to poor system performance.
The system`s slow performance introduced delays that compounded upon themselves and sharply impacted customer service, billing cycles, identification and management of non-paying accounts.
The utility needed more processing power, far greater reliability, and a better approach to data management. KP&L purchased two eight-processor Sun Enterprise 5000 servers and a Sun StorEdge disk array with 50 GB of disk storage as the platform for its new customer service and billing application.
Moving the customer service and billing applications to the Sun Enterprise 5000 servers is producing impressive results. The key to this success is the Sun Enterprise 5000 server`s high performance and availability. Now the billing application processes each incoming batch of meter readings overnight, producing complete and accurate customer billings before the next batch arrives.
This has eliminated the backlog of unprocessed readings that used to plague KP&L and with the Sun platform delivering up-to-date information, KP&L tracks customer accounts more closely. This enables KP&L to identify problems accounts rapidly and take corrective action faster, which is paying off in sharply reduced losses due to overdue accounts.
In addition, the logging, tracking, and management of customer requests for new or modified service are more up-to-date, more accurate, and more continuously available to service representatives, enhanced customer satisfaction and public image.
Additionally, the IS department itself benefits because the performance and reliability of the Sun systems reduce the time and resources needed for repair and maintenance, which enables the department to spend more time on proactive activities.
KP&L uses Sun products for many administrative tasks needed to run its main data centre, such as SunNet Domain Manager running on a Sun Enterprise 1 server for network management tasks.
Another Sun Enterprise 1 server handles connectivity for KP&L`s network by managing its routers and modems. Data backup is automated and accelerated on the Sun StorEdge disk array platform. Legend Technologies helps upgrade applications and establish data management practices. Overall, Kinuthia reports the IS staff is quite enthusiastic about the operational improvements in the data center since KP&L has started using Sun and Legend Technologies as a major vendor.
The utility also employs SPARCserver 4 servers at its generating plants for the maintenance management application.
Kinuthia summarises KP&L`s relationship with Sun very neatly by observing, "We need superior reliability and performance. Sun servers give us the best reliability and performance we`ve ever had, plus we get excellent support from the local Sun reseller at every step. There is no doubt in my mind--the money we`ve spent on Sun servers has been very wisely spent."
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