In 2016, two of the UK’s largest utility companies joined forces as a result of new government regulations, creating one of the UK’s largest business utility suppliers, The Client. Serving all types of business customers, from small independents to the largest national chains, the aim was to make the two companies more competitive, improve customer service and increase the number of products on offer. A major systems integration project was required to share data and consolidate systems.

This was a complex, large scale project to knit together the systems and data of two vast utility companies. The Client needed to access customer data seamlessly from numerous sources, including customer contact details; interactive voice response (IVR); meter readings; finance data (bills and payments); customer bank details, and utility records. This data was held in disparate locations across both company’s legacy systems, including CRMs, ERPs and finance. The Client knew that the scale of the task called for a highly adaptable middleware platform and chose WSO2 as the best solution. As a WSO2 Premier Integration Partner, Mitra was chosen for its middleware expertise based on experience implementing projects of a similar scale and complexity.

Mitra’s experienced integration experts proposed an architecture stack that would utilise WSO2 technology to produce a resilient integration platform. It would be able to cater for the high volume of transactions expected and guaranteed on-time message delivery. The team worked rigorously on refining user stories developing a full understanding of the project requirements before starting over 40 complex integrations that were required. A major part of the project was the integration of two legacy ERP systems, both of which had existing connections to and from multiple third-parties through numerous APIs. Simply integrating the systems was not enough, additional elements such as email alerts and archiving email messages was required. Capabilities such as Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) were incorporated as part of the integration work carried out by Mitra.