Still, Morgan's confidence had its limits. "He trusted what we were doing, but his trust had a rope with a noose on the end of it," says Keen.
In November 2006, Keen and his team began developing a prototype for a new e-commerce and billing engine that would be part of an open-source initiative called NextStar. The system would support BlueStar's customer enrollment, billing, e-commerce, accounting, cash management and other financial operations.
But BlueStar executives wanted more, says Keen. They ordered up a comprehensive system that would enable the company to offer unique services to its customers, such as the ability to analyze their own energy consumption.
Such services are important to smaller retail electricity suppliers, says Zarko Sumic, an analyst at Gartner. "[They] need to develop a portfolio that's equivalent to what the large players have," he explains.
The project team initially focused on identifying and streamlining each of the core business processes that would be handled by the NextStar system, including integration with third-party payment providers, such as PayPal and Bank of America, and receipt of metered data from Commonwealth Edison and other utilities, says enterprise architect Guillermo Tantachuco. "The key was to think big, start small and show early value," he says.
For Tantachuco, those efforts began on the day he joined the company in July 2006. On that day, Morgan informed Tantachuco and other project team members that they needed to develop a customer enrollment system that would go live by October. The group developed a click-through prototype by mid-September and had the production-ready version completed by the end of the month, Tantachuco says.
Keen, Tantachuco and other members of the initial four-person project team used a variety of open-source and commercial technologies to build out the functionality and support in the NextStar system. Among them were Project Open's project management tools.
But the framework for BlueStar's IT architecture was developed using open-source Java software from SpringSource. The company selected SpringSource's offering based on its cost, platform independence and breadth of enterprise-class features, Tantachuco says. Moreover, the Java vendor had "a road map of where they'd be in three years, and that mapped with our plans."
Most of the Java frameworks that BlueStar evaluated didn't meet its selection criteria, which included consistent architecture and design across different layers of systems, flexible and extensible APIs and security across all architecture layers, says Tantachuco.