Reduced Costs

• Reduced costs
• New services
• Greater agility
• Easier regulatory compliance

Situation

Constellation Energy of Baltimore, Maryland, supplies energy products and services to wholesale and retail electric and natural gas customers. It owns a diversified fleet of generating units located in the United States and Canada, totaling approximately 7,100 megawatts of generating capacity. The company delivers electricity and natural gas through the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. A Fortune 500 company, Constellation Energy has 10,000 employees and 2009 revenues of U.S.$15.6 billion.

On September 15, 2008, Constellation Energy, along with thousands of other companies, faced unexpected business shifts in the midst of an already-bleak economic downturn. Liquidity suddenly became a major objective for the company, and Constellation Energy launched a year-long effort to reduce costs across the board.

The IT organization wanted to speed up its vendor consolidation efforts for the company’s Web properties. Constellation Energy maintains about 30 public-facing Web sites for Constellation Energy, Baltimore Gas and Electric, smart energy usage, retirees, and other purposes. It used a mix of content management, collaboration, search, wiki, and other software to run these public sites, plus thousands of internal sites.

Specifically, IT used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide collaboration and document-sharing capabilities on 5,000 internal project sites, Vignette content management software to maintain the 30 external and many internal sites, Autonomy search software, Confluence wiki software, and a large ECM systemfor records management. “We wanted to reduce our overall vendor footprint and total costs,” says John Deermer, Supervisor for Microsoft Platformsat Constellation Energy. “We had seven staff members supporting three different major platforms. We were incurring a large expense for Vignette licensing fees. And our Web server infrastructure was climbing dramatically. Vignette ran on UNIX operating system–based servers, and they were really expensive.” Also, maintaining all these vendor relationships was a great deal of work and expense for the Constellation Energy purchasing organization.

In addition to reducing costs, Constellation Energy wanted to make its public Web properties more compelling and use them as avenues for introducing competitive, differentiating services. It also wanted to simplify content publishing and information-sharing for internal users, who often had to wait in line for help from IT personnel in publishing content and updating their Web sites. Constellation Energy was also looking for ways to improve its auditing and reporting ability with regard to regulatory compliance.

Solution

In mid-2009, Deermer sat down with his local Microsoft representative to look at the Microsoft road map for Office SharePoint Server. Constellation Energy had already made Microsoft a preferred vendor, had thousands of Office SharePoint Server 2007 project sites, used the Microsoft Office system on its desktop computers, had hundreds of databases running Microsoft SQL Server data management software, and used Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as its messaging program. “Because of our existing commitment to Microsoft, it made sense to expand our use of SharePoint Server in our Web environment,” Deermer says.

Greatly Strengthened Product

However, during the same meeting, Constellation Energy learned of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the successor to Office SharePoint Server 2007, and liked the looks of that program even better. “The enhanced record center capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 would enable us to eliminate our current ECM system, which represented a significant licensing expense,” Deermer says. “Also, the security model in SharePoint Server 2010 is better for external sites, the interface is much cleaner and easier to work with, and the wiki and blog features are better developed. The development tool, SharePoint Designer, is also more robust. Everything about the product is greatly strengthened and better suited for our needs.”

Constellation Energy joined the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Rapid Deployment Program in November 2009 and collaborated with Microsoft Services to accelerate its understanding of the program features and deployment. “Microsoft Services was instrumental in getting all our server topologies together,” Deermer says. “Their technical insights helped deepen our internal SharePoint knowledge, which accelerated our ability to architect efficient business solutions.”

Links to Business Applications

A big advantage of using SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for its public and internal Web sites is Business Connectivity Services, a feature of SharePoint composites (also called Mashups). SharePoint compositesare solutions created from out-of-the-box SharePoint components and tools without the need to develop custom code. Constellation Energy plans to link SharePoint Server 2010 with key line-of-business applications such as PeopleSoft, Oracle Financials, Siebel CRM, and several custom Microsoft .NET and Java applications. “With the ability to link SharePoint with Oracle and Siebel, we’ll be able to do very competitive things on our Web sites,” Deermer says.

For example, on its public site, Constellation Energy could create an interactive, online power-buying tool that would let wholesale customers search for and purchase the cheapest electrical power. “Using Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Server 2010, we can connect customer, power pricing, and other kinds of data with SharePoint Web parts to surface this information on our Web sites,” Deermer says. “Once a customer logs on, we can see what kind of business they are, what kind of power they’ve purchased, and identify the closest and most cost-effective power sources. These customer requests are currently handled by different organizations in our business, but with SharePoint Server 2010, we could centralize these services and convert them into self-service features on our Web site.”

Constellation Energy will be able to perform similar data integration on internal Web sites. For example, the company has power monitoring servers that continuously monitor equipment in Constellation Energy power plants. “We have Web parts that will snap right into both SharePoint Server 2010 and the power monitoring servers so that we will be able to create an easy-to-use dashboard for our operational teams. Then we’ll be able to observe status and changes in water chemistry, turbine heat, and other operating variables,” Deermer says. “We will also aggregate readings from multiple power plants onto one page, so current staff can monitor even more facilities. With such a dashboard, we would be able to catch a fan that was about to fail and fix it before it disrupted service.”

Wikis, Blogs, and Search

Constellation Energy previously had wikis on its internal Web sites, but used another program, Confluence software, to provide this capability. “Now we can move all that data into SharePoint Server 2010,” Deermer says. “Teams can better share data and insights in blogs and wikis, in addition to posting documents.”

Constellation Energy will also be able to retire Autonomy for Web search functionality. “We plan to retire Autonomy and use FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint,” Deermer says. “This will enable us to further consolidate our vendor relationships.”

More Robust Records Management

Down the road, Constellation Energy will replace its current ECM system with SharePoint Server 2010 for records management. “SharePoint Server 2010 can now accommodate a much larger number of documents than SharePoint Server 2007 could,” Deermer says. “SharePoint Server 2010 is also more stable and generally more robust, which is necessary for running an enterprise records management system.”

Constellation Energy also plans to use SharePoint Server 2010 to help with regulatory compliance, such as Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), as mandated by American Presidential directive PDD-63 of May 1998.

Constellation Energy intends to have its 30 external and 5,000 internal sites migrated to SharePoint Server 2010 by the end of 2011, its employee portal site migrated to the program by 2011, and its records management system migrated off its current ECM to SharePoint Server 2010 in 2012. Every project team already has a SharePoint site where team members manage project details online. The IT staff will be able to reuse many of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 artifacts and will not have to redo extensive site creation work.

Benefits

By replacing its current ECM, Vignette, Confluence, and Autonomy software with SharePoint Server 2010, Constellation Energy will significantly reduce costs over five years, be able to offer new Web-based services that enhance customer service and profits, and give the business greater agility through easier information-sharing.

Savings of $1 Million Over Five Years

By consolidating its Web landscape from multiple products and vendors to SharePoint Server 2010, Constellation Energy estimates that it will be able to significantly reduce costs and greatly simplify the work of managing multiple contracts and vendor relationships.

“We will save more than $1 million over several years by combining our portal, document management, and collaboration systems into SharePoint Server 2010,” Deermer says. “We’ll also reduce our Web-related servers from 81 physical servers to a mixture of 38 physical and virtual servers, further reducing overall cost. Constellation Energy also will be able to use virtual machines to further multiply its Web server resources, because SharePoint Server 2010 performs exceptionally well in a virtual environment.

Web management and maintenance costs will shrink, too. “We’ll be able to reduce our Web maintenance expenses by up to half, because we will have a single Web program to support instead of three to five,” Deermer says. “We’ll be able to redeploy staff to other areas of the business where they can add new value.”

New Services

With the new Web capabilities provided by SharePoint Server 2010, such as Web site linkage to line-of-business applications, Constellation Energy will be able to create more competitive services on its Web sites. “Services such as an online power-selling tool that we’d like to build just aren’t possible without the new features of SharePoint Server 2010,” Deermer says. “This and similar services will enable us to better serve our customers, attract new customers, and generate new revenues.”

Greater Agility from Faster Information Sharing

With easier content publishing, blogs, wikis, and usability enhancements in SharePoint Server 2010, Constellation Energy employees can more easily and frequently publish and update information to share knowledge and find needed resources. “Agility is key in the power industry,” Deermer says. “We have to be able to move quickly to respond to changing power prices, environmental issues, and even political situations. Our business users are very excited about getting more direct control over their content deployment and publishing process. They will be able to create their own content pages and change them when they want. SharePoint Designer is a lot easier to use, and the fact that employees can use [Microsoft Office] Word to create and post content to SharePoint sites will simplify publishing quite a bit. The new search capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 will help employees find information faster. The faster that employees can move, the faster the company can move.”

Easier Regulatory Compliance

Last but not least, Constellation Energy will be able to more easily comply with various regulatory requirements with documents stored in SharePoint Server 2010. “SharePoint Server 2010 will help with CIP compliance, for one,” Deermer says. “We can use SharePoint auditing to find out who checked out a document, added a document, changed document permissions, and so forth. We are audited regularly and required to present document management logs, and it’s less cumbersome to gather these logs with SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 2010 provides robust reporting out of the box.”

Deermer feels good about his group’s contributions to the company’s belt-tightening efforts, and even better about the new capabilities that Constellation Energy will gain by standardizing on SharePoint Server 2010 across its Web environment.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.

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