ICL Plc has won a contract to supply its network asset database for the utilities industry, the Universal database or Udb, to British Gas Plc’s gas transportation arm, Transco. The BG company will use the database to ultimately support access to information required by Transco’s asset and work management systems. The database itself is based around an Oracle Corp database and is a result of a marketing agreement ICL has with US-based software house Universal Information Inc, who originally developed the system, for US electricity utilities. The Udb has been designed to enable a variety of systems, within a utility organization to be integrated via the main database. The Udb acts as a network information hub, being able to receive updates from systems as they happen, checking which other systems may need to know about these updates and passing the information on. All types of object can be modeled within the Udb without new code having to be written, with each type of object associated with a previously defined type that inherits all the rules and procedures applicable to the parent type. The Transco contract is the third Udb that ICL has sold in the UK in the past few years, and comes just weeks after ICL clinched a 160m pound deal with BG to operate Transco’s facilities management business (CI No 3,220). ICL’s utilities team marketing manager, David Keane believes the Udb supplied by ICL is unique and said the company hasn’t sold any of the systems to the continent because the same sort of competition doesn’t exist. Although ICL usually supplies Udb on Sun Microsystems Inc servers, but other platforms are supported.
