Contact Energy has been granted a waiver to do business with majority shareholder Origin Energy.Contact began a major project to introduce new business processes and an integrated single technology platform in October 2009 through external IT services pro
Contact Energy has been granted a waiver to do business with majority shareholder Origin Energy.
Contact began a major project to introduce new business processes and an integrated single technology platform in October 2009 through external IT services provider Wipro Technologies.
Origin, which owns 51.8% of Contact, is undertaking a similar project with the same provider.
Contact sought to take advantage of scale by hosting its new IT infrastructure in a shared data centre with Origin – but came up against NZX rules preventing material transactions between related parties.
A waiver has since been granted, on the grounds that the infrastructure managed services was a small part of Contact’s wider transformation project, with an expected cost of no more than $2.5m.
Contact spokeswoman Louise Griffin said the transformation was progressing well, with the first phase of the transformation – legacy finance – to be completed in late 2010.
The completion of the asset management and retail system phases will be completed in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
The project will use products and services provided by global software provider SAP NZ, as provided by Wipro.
