UXC lands mega Vic water deal

Systems integrator UXC has landed a major deal rolling out a complete Oracle stack for a business transformation project at Victorian utility City West Water.

The transformation project, codenamed Arrow, had been in the works for at least two years.

It was born from a review of the utility's IT strategy in the 2009-10 financial year, and underwent a "business case phase" in which City West Water analysed "the costs and benefits of staged replacement of the company's core business systems with an enterprise solution", according to its 2010 annual report.

City West Water's latest annual report, tabled a fortnight ago, placed Arrow in the "procurement phase, following an initial review which concluded that the implementation of a company wide integrated software solution will help simplify operations, improve efficiency and strengthen customer service capability".

The utility tendered for systems integration, application and infrastructure support services late last year and awarded the contract to UXC and its Oracle business Red Rock Consulting.

City West Water will roll out an Oracle technology stack encompassing applications, database, integration middleware, hardware and operating systems.

UXC said in a statement today that it would begin work with "a detailed enterprise design and implementation planning process".

UXC managing director Cris Nicolli said that process would "set the project goals, design specifications and functional definitions".

Phase two would involve the implementation of core Oracle ERP modules with a third phase aimed at building out the infrastructure.

Once it reached that infrastructure build-out phase, Nicolli said it would become "one of the largest contracts" that UXC had won.

He was unable to disclose the exact value of the deal, however, UXC had previously claimed wins at Victoria's WorkCover Authority and the Transport Accident Commission among its biggest.

Reports at the time pegged at least one of those deals at $50 million.

Nicolli said the Oracle stack was jointly chosen by UXC and City West Water.

UXC lodged its formal tender responses for the project around February of this year.