Commander announced today that it had won a major tender with electrical transmission network TransGrid to redesign its power outage system.
The telco has entered into a deal worth an estimated AU$2 million with TransGrid, the owner and operator of the New South Wales high voltage electricity transmission network, to engineer a new outage monitoring system.
Commander's proposed solution is called THEOS (THE Outage planning System) and is designed to replace a number of overlapping systems, including TransGrid's mainframe.
According to Commander, THEOS will enable TransGrid to centralise its network monitoring and collect critical information necessary to respond to power outages and perform maintenance more effectively.
"This new system will manage a significant part of what we do," said Gordon Dunsworth, TransGrid's CIO.
"With THEOS, we're looking at virtualising the control room -- it's basically going to function like one big data network," he said.
Dunsworth said that the company has been taking steps in this direction for some time following the adoption of a number of other smaller .NET applications.
The announcement comes after a torrid month for the telco, in which it has had to fight off rumours of an immediate sale after engaging the services of ABN AMRO to examine the proposition and following an e-mail leak divulged a potential list of buyers.
Recently, the company has signed two other significant IT infrastructure deals, worth a combined total of about AU$28 million with the Victorian Department of Education and the Federal Department of Finance and Administration.
