Dear customer,
Dear partner,

The holiday season is at our doorstep. With the first snow and the beginning of a long and cold winter, we have a lot of interesting news to share with you.

This new edition of the Ferranti newsletter offers you an overview of new projects, some news from our customers and a calendar with events where you can meet us.

You will notice when reading about our new office in Germany and the MECOMS™ implementations at Scanenergi and Gaz de Bordeaux, that our international expansion is rapidly increasing.

We are also delighted to feature two realized cases for the ICT infrastructure business unit, focusing on unified communications and virtualization.

Finally, I wish you all the best for 2011. Let’s make a great year together!

Enjoy reading,

Franky Baert
Managing Director

Gaz de Bordeaux

Gaz de Bordeaux, one of the largest local gas distribution companies in France, has chosen MECOMS™ as their solution platform for the future. Ferranti’s French partner, Euriware, will be implementing and supporting MECOMS™. Gaz de Bordeaux, gas supplier, and sister company REGAZ who is the grid operator supply around 250.000 customers in the Bordeaux region.

Gaz de Bordeaux chose MECOMS™ for its flexibility and adaptability to be able to support future business needs with the further liberalization of the French energy market. The project includes Microsoft Dynamics AX, and MECOMS™ and AX will be implemented as one, integrated platform for all of Gaz de Bordeaux and REGAZ’s business processes. The new system is scheduled to go live by Q4 2011.

Scanenergi

Logica Denmark has just signed a contract with Denmark's third largest electricity supplier Scanenergi for the implementation of MECOMS™ as new platform for AMR, CRM and Billing.

Scanenergi is involved in electricity trading, energy management and energy consultancy. The company has existed for 10 years, based in Ikast, Denmark and has staff and offices spread throughout Denmark. Scanenergi has approx. 80 employees and is as Denmark's third largest electricity trading company in a continued positive growth.

Scanenergi will implement MECOMS™ as a total solution to support their entire business and the solution will in addition to traditional ERP in Microsoft Dynamics AX cover:

• Billing and settlement of over 150,000 customers
• Automatic meter reading of initially up to 50,000 meters
• CRM with handling of advanced electricity contracts and products
• Customer Service functionality including a self-service portal & Performance Management
• Portfolio Management and Forecast

Minister van der Hoeven inaugurates national tourism database.

Outgoing Minister of Economic Affairs Maria van der Hoeven officially opened the National Tourism, Recreation and Culture Database (NDTRC) this afternoon. The NDTRC will ensure that Dutch tourism and recreation information is more efficiently managed, updated and distributed. As such, it represents an important step in the further development of quality service for both national and international leisure consumers.

At the click of a button, the minister symbolically activated the database in the recently extended head offices of VVV Netherlands in Leersum.  

Initiative

VVV Netherlands, the Dutch Tourist and Conference Bureau and the Dutch Uitburo took the joint initiative to develop the national database. Until today, there was no single nationwide database in which all information relevant to tourism, recreation and culture was stored, managed and made accessible to the public. The Ministry for Economic Affairs supported the initiative after which VVV Netherlands took the lead in the actual development and realisation of the project.

Car-Pass, the compulsory document containing the complete history of a vehicle, has drastically reduced odometer fraud in Belgium. It is now about to be adopted on a European scale.

Thanks to Car-Pass and the fact that it is compulsory, the extent of fraudulent manipulation of odometer readings has been reduced from 60 000 instances in 2006 to just 1400 in 2009 (a mere 0.2% of the market). The practice, in other words, has almost been stamped out in Belgium. According to the not-for profit which manages the Car-Pass, the initiative has saved Belgian consumers around €120 million (the difference between the purchase price and repair costs). The Belgian second hand market is therefore protected, all the more because Car-Pass is relatively cheap and because the law requires all professionals in the auto sector to register odometer readings and chassis numbers after every intervention, even for a simple tyre change or towing service. Unfortunately, the 30 000 to 40 000 cars which are still imported into the country every year still slip through the net.

The efficiency of the Car-Pass has therefore had the perverse side effect of isolating Belgium from the rest of Europe.

Read the full story

Germany has a unique combination of large, specialized energy companies and integrated municipal "Stadtwerke". Ferranti’s MECOMS™ solution is uniquely positioned to offer a solution for utilities of all sizes and help them cope with their specific business challenges.

To increase our presence in Germany, Ferranti has inaugurated an office in Oberhausen. Stephan Rebbelmund will direct the business development in Germany, together with local MECOMS™ partners.

Visit www.mecoms.de for more information about MECOMS™ for German utilities.

President’s Club represents a group of top channel partners who reach key business milestones while maintaining a constant dedication to achieving high levels of customer satisfaction and an active pursuit of product and technological advancement.

Microsoft thanks Ferranti for its deep commitment to mutual customers and for continuing to strive towards business excellence. Ferranti has achieved quite an accomplishment to earn its way into this prestigious group, and has demonstrated the ability to drive success even in challenging economic times!

For the municipality of Meise, it is important that the server infrastructure runs as efficiently as possible, yet is simple in terms of management. For this reason, the municipality was looking for a partner with the aim of restructuring the existing IT network into a virtualised environment. The major objectives that were to be achieved were standardisation, reliability, flexibility, a high level of availability and centralised management of the system. The scalability of the infrastructure also had to be taken into account, to satisfy the objective of hosting a number of services themselves in the future.

Ferranti Computer Systems successfully installed the vBOX solution here, with the result that the municipality of Meise now has an optimised IT infrastructure.