3rd Party IBM Support Funds Green Energy, Grid Stability

As the world inches closer to mass adoption of clean power, many energy and utilities providers face a difficult challenge: delivering it.

The energy grid in the United States is outmoded for the green future that awaits it. With age comes cracks in grid stability and in Texas in early 2021, fears turned into reality as the state’s isolated electric supply struggled to cope with surging demand and limited supply amid harsh conditions.

There’s no confusion about what needs to happen. Energy and utilities companies must adopt new technologies to incorporate new power sources and promote greater resiliency across the grid.

However, the question remains: How do energy and utilities providers innovate back-end legacy IT when all capital spend is going toward clean energy and grid stability?

Finding Funding in IBM Software

Where profits aren’t funnelled into digital transformation, businesses are looking toward shifting operating expenses (OPEX) into capital expenditures (CAPEX). The mindset pushes organizations to review the technology underpinning their IT infrastructures and identify bloated areas of the budget, such as software.

Energy and utilities providers by and large are running older IBM software versions with price tags that don’t align with their strong stability and inherently consistent uptime. IBM® MQ, IBM® WebSphere Application Server, IBM® Datastage and IBM® Informix are common enterprise platforms used in the industry, but they’re also incredibly reliable when maintained properly.

Given companies have eyes on incorporating new technology in the near future, spending millions every year on support that is rarely – or worse, never – used is a colossal misallocation of financial resources.

In the Gartner Market Guide for Independent Third-Party Support for IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP Software, analysts identify independent third-party support providers like Origina as viable opportunities for companies to save up to 50 percent on their annual software maintenance costs. Apart from the reduction of fixed costs, the avoidance of forced upgrades through extending the software’s lifecycle also affects total cost of ownership for IBM investments.

In larger enterprises, these savings can produce a significant windfall in funding to be used toward green energy and grid stability.

Leveraging the Advantages of Third-Party Support

Energy and utilities providers like Southern California Edison and Exelon are turning to third-party IBM software support as a means of cutting OPEX without impacting operations. The independent support model provides the financial flexibility to substantially trim operating expenses, and the contractual flexibility to plan and execute an IBM software exit strategy if the IT roadmap dictates it.

Learn more about how Origina supports procurement professionals here.

Third-party software support isn’t only a cost-cutting exercise though. The intimate support model assigns dedicated independent Global IBM® Experts to each IBM product Origina supports. These experts carry at least 15 years of experience in the products they support and include some of the original developers themselves.

Companies IT teams can take advantage of these skill sets to bolster their technical resources, which can be especially useful when carrying out grid stability projects or integrating new technologies with legacy software.

Learn more about how Origina supports IT operations here.

In short, third-party IBM software delivers the savings on OPEX which allow energy and utilities providers to shift budget into CAPEX and projects which will help realize their goal of incorporating green energy and promoting grid stability.

To learn more about whether third-party IBM support is right for your business, contact us today