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Customer Overview:

ATS, based in Eastern North Carolina, was founded in 1996 with a technological vision that is fast becoming the standard for change within electric distribution utilities nationwide. ATS is a subsidiary of Cooperatives Computer Center (CCC) of Tallahassee, Florida. With more than 35 years experience managing cooperatives and providing technology solutions, CCC is one of the original five NRECA technology cooperatives in the US. For more information, visit www.atscorporation.com

ATS offers the OpenOne suite of solutions, which is revolutionizing the way electric distribution utilities function in this new century. The driving force behind OpenOne is integration - enter data only once through an easy-to-use Windows interface and share it throughout the entire organization. At the core is a single Oracle data repository that connects all of the financials, customer information and billing, ESRI-based GIS and outage management applications together. This breakthrough approach for managing a utility is delivering substantial employee productivity gains, dramatically improved customer service and has enhanced the financial position of the client companies.

Along with the OpenOne suite of solutions, ATS brings to its clients today's best practices for the electric distribution industry. With the complexities of today’s marketplace and the availability of diverse technologies, ATS believes it is important to facilitate the access and integration of all "best in class" systems for the greatest possible success in implementing world-class solutions for their clients.

Challenge

In assessing the future direction for OpenOne, the ATS development team looked at converting the application from Oracle Forms to another language or migrating the application to the latest version of Oracle Forms (10g).

They selected the option to migrate to Forms 10g. This provided ATS the ability to access new technology and to enable the Application Server technology to include additional languages, such as J2EE. Once this decision had been reached, ATS then looked to the market to see where staff could be resourced that would enhance ATS’ product upgrade strategy.

Following a search of vendors, CipherSoft was selected due to its expertise and the resources it made available to address the application’s complex structure. A pilot project using 300 Forms was assembled, and an assessment of the time and cost to migrate was finalized. The result of the pilot produced a list of conversion items and the costs associated with each. ATS approved the migration project.

Solution

By combining ATS’s application strategy with CipherSoft resources, the entire migration of the OpenOne application to 10g was completed within three months.

Results

As a result of the successful migration, ATS was able to productize a new release of the application and launched it to market. From a client server legacy basis, OpenOne has emerged as a rich application server application. ATS has consolidated years of embedded development IP into a modern functioning application.

According to Mr Rocky Allen, Director of IT Services at ATS, “We are very happy with the results of the migration and CipherSoft resources enabled achievement of our upgrade objectives.”