Coreso, looks after Western Europe’s electricity distribution grids, has retained Bull as its outsourcing supplier for mission-critical IT infrastructure.

Bull will provide support to guarantee the availability of the company’s information systems. Coreso is owned and run by the electricity Transmission System Operators (TSOs): RTE in France, Elia in Belgium, National Grid in the UK, Terna in Italy and 50 Hertz in Germany.  

The company delivers network security analyses and 24x7 network surveillance, to check and improve the security of supply level in Western Europe and avoid large-scale incidents.

Coreso's role is to constantly watch over electricity networks and continuously feed back data gathered from all the European TSOs – as well as to analyse this data using powerful computational algorithms and enable rapid decision-making.

Through the outsourcing contact Bull will provide all the necessary skills to support Coreso’s mission-critical information system, which is supervised and administered from Bull’s main data center by experts in high availability.

François Boulet, CEO of Coreso, explains: “When your role is to secure electricity supplies to almost 215 million people – 43% of the European population – responsiveness is not an empty word. We continuously analyse over 50,000 items of information and we have to guarantee the permanent availability of the information system hosting that data. Any incident has to be treated with the utmost responsiveness and that’s what we expect from our outsourcing partner, Bull.”

The network is an essential component of this highly specific and complex information system, whose architecture was designed and implemented by Bull in 2008.

“Bull specialises in mission-critical digital systems and has clearly understood how to support our highly specific business model, since our creation. Their ability to respond to an extremely complex and varied technological environment, their expertise in networks and security, and their European coverage are essential factors in partnership,” said Boulet.

Jérôme Belley, director of Bull’s outsourcing business in France, concludes: “Our European high availability experts and multi-lingual support team – capable of exchanging ideas with support centres through Europe – are organised to respond to Coreso’s vital need for responsiveness. This ability to adapt to a highly specific mission-critical context is one of the key strengths of Bull’s flexible outsourcing approach.”