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Article: PG&E plans to extend world-class customer service. (Pacific Gas & Electric uses client/server system) (Client/Server Computing Edition) (Cover Story)
- Article from:
- Software Magazine
- Article date:
- November 15, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Wiesner Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE UTILITY CHOSE A CLIENT/SERVER REDESIGN OF ITS CUSTOMER SYSTEM, FOCUSED ON PROCESS, PARTNERS AND EASILY INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS
For some, the late 1960s, call forth visions of Haight-Ashbury, flower children and the Grateful Dead. Alan Simila also sees the architectural core of Pacific Gas & Electric's (PG&E's) 1960s-model customer information system (CIS): A 100 gigabyte-plus flat file stored on a mainframe that contains PG&E's entire customer database.
While the Grateful Dead keep on trucking through the '90's, Simila noted that "after 4,000 changes and several generations of hardware, it [the flat file] doesn't really support today's business ...