Driving a key pillar of National Gas’ successful separation journey by leveraging Capgemini’s multi cloud platform expertise

National Gas partnered with Capgemini to build a flexible, scalable, and expandable technology platform for its future as a separate entity, with little disruption to customer, operations, and business functions.

Client Challenge:

A consortium led by private equity firm Macquarie acquired a controlling stake in National Gas Transmission and Metering, requiring full separation of all business technology services by January 2025.

Solution:

Harnessing deep expertise with the multi cloud platform, Capgemini helped National Gas secure separation and exit of Transitional Service Agreements – operating across the lifecycle from design to delivery.

Benefits:

• Achieved Transitional Service Agreement deadline, avoiding any penalties
• Transformed infrastructure from on-premises data centre to a scalable multi cloud platform
• Improved speed of future deliveries and time to market through transformed application architectures with DevOps pipelines
• Improved security posture and resilience, addressing many critical vulnerabilities
• Greater visibility of application and platform usage, costs, and criticality

Critical infrastructure, pressing deadlines, and a zero-disruption mandate

As part of the UK Energy Transition to meet Net Zero targets and secure more sustainable energy sources, National Grid has been focusing on its electricity portfolio and divesting non-core business units since 2019.

A consortium led by private equity firm Macquarie acquired a controlling stake in National Gas Transmission and Metering in January 2023, with full separation required by January 2025 (within two years). This was driven by 12 Transitional Service Agreement (TSAs) carrying millions in penalties through extensions.

With a complex portfolio of interconnected business and technology services – including Critical Network Infrastructure – it was crucial for the separation to happen with zero disruption to customer, operations, and business functions.

Very tight timeframes and a backdrop of geopolitical conflict meant National Gas needed a technology platform and backbone which was flexible, scalable, and able to expand to meet future needs. National Gas partnered with Capgemini across its business – including security, apps, and networks – taking advantage of Capgemini’s expertise and capabilities as a strategic end to end partner.

Navigating complexity with a unique delivery model

Capgemini employed a scalable delivery via a two-tier model: Programme Partner and Scalable delivery teams to design, build, test, and move into service transition. This meant they could successfully navigate programmes with many vendors, as well as suppliers, partners, and Macquarie. Plus, do so with clear impact to critical path whilst being able to direct the delivery teams on the priority, direction, and solutions.

These teams were aligned in a single governance and delivery methodology, passing through architecture, security, change, and delivery stage gates. This included the migration and upgrade of more than 30 business critical applications from two on-premise data centres to a modern cloud platform, 100+ SaaS applications, development of critical DevOps pipelines using infrastructure as code and file, and API-based integration services. Across other towers there were security tooling applications used by end users like National Gas’ customers.

The cloud provider was active in supporting major business service cut overs; through augmented service support, active feature development, and providing critical configuration of services for novel situations. Not only was the separation achieved without disruption, to target, and to budget, but also all parties involved – including senior leaders at Macquarie – gave glowing reports on the delivery, culture, and true collaboration of the two-year project.

Britain’s net zero future, supported by a resilient National Gas

National Gas’s primary focus is securing Britain’s energy and unlocking a net zero future. The provider continues to play a critical role in the UK’s energy transition – meeting 36% of energy needs at peak time.

Strategically, National Gas is leveraging its existing network by introducing Hydrogen to further decarbonise. This strategy presents both opportunities and challenges but with a digital-first IT backbone, National Gas can rapidly scale new services and products, at pace, to new and/or existing stakeholders, markets, and customers.

As National Gas looks forward to its RIIO 3 commitments to maintain safe, reliable, and resilient services, there are increasing opportunities and challenges the technology function will have to respond to. This includes the advances and adoption of data and AI, the affinity between OT and IT, and heightened cyber security threats.

The cloud platform will play a pivotal role; providing an integrated place to innovate at pace and manage critical business services, including AI technologies, to support critical decisions, and maintain asset infrastructure.