Capital cities don’t get to experiment with their core systems. Billing runs have to clear. Customer service has to function. And when something changes, it has to change without drama.
Recently, Utility Solutions Partners (USP) partnered with two capital-city utilities on very different — but equally high-stakes — Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) initiatives. One focused on stabilizing and modernizing a legacy platform under real operational pressure. The other tackled a disciplined move to the cloud, with governance and repeatability at the forefront.
Different paths. Same expectation: no disruption, no surprises, no excuses.
CITY OF SACRAMENTO
MODERNIZING WITHOUT SHAKING THE FOUNDATION
For the City of Sacramento, the challenge wasn’t deciding whether to modernize; it was how to do it without compromising day-to-day operations.
Sacramento was operating a highly customized CC&B 2.6 environment that supported water, wastewater, drainage, solid waste, and treatment services for over 150,000 customer accounts — 16 billing cycles. Thousands of bills are processed nightly, with more than 120 concurrent users. An unsupported platform quietly increases risk with every passing month
Downtime wasn’t an option. A rushed upgrade wasn’t either.
USP worked alongside Sacramento to execute a carefully sequenced upgrade to CC&B 2.9, one that prioritized stability first, while steadily reducing technical debt and strengthening the platform’s long-term viability. Rather than treating the upgrade as a version jump, the team focused on cleaning up years of accumulated customizations, validating billing and batch processing early, and maintaining tight governance as complexity emerged.
The result was a calmer, cleaner transition, modernizing the platform without disrupting the operations that depend on it every single day. Just as importantly, Sacramento emerged with a more maintainable environment and a clearer runway for future modernization, including potential cloud initiatives, without having to start over.
CITY OF RALEIGH
IMPLEMENTING CLOUD TECHNOLOGY WITH CONFIDENCE
For the City of Raleigh, the story was different — but the stakes were just as high.
As North Carolina’s capital and a rapidly growing municipal utility, Raleigh knew cloud migration was inevitable. What wasn’t inevitable was how it would be done. Rather than chasing speed or buzzwords, Raleigh approached its move to Oracle Customer Care & Billing Cloud Service (CCB-CS) as a governed transformation, one designed to be repeatable, controlled, and resilient.
Drawing on a partnership with USP that spans multiple CC&B upgrades and managed services engagements since 2017, Raleigh focused early on the things that tend to derail cloud projects when they’re ignored: integrations, governance, and business readiness.
Integrations were addressed from the first month, not deferred. Cross-functional teams, spanning business, IT, security, partners, vendors, and Oracle, operated with a clear cadence and accountability. Business processes and SOPs were aligned early, shaping training, testing, and user adoption. And development constraints within CCB-CS were understood upfront, allowing the team to plan refactoring deliberately instead of reacting late.
By treating cloud migration as a program — not a technical shortcut — Raleigh successfully migrated its CIS to the cloud while establishing a delivery model that can be reused for future initiatives.
DIFFERENT PATHS. SAME DISCIPLINE
Sacramento’s upgrade and Raleigh’s cloud implementation followed different paths, but both were delivered with the same level of discipline and care. In each case, USP led with thorough planning, strong governance, and a delivery approach grounded in real utility operations, resulting in smooth, stable go-lives with minimal to no disruption.
These projects reinforce a simple truth capital cities know well:
Confidence doesn’t come from the platform alone; it comes from how USP manages risk, complexity, and execution.
That’s the difference between going live and going forward.
ABout USP
USP is a leading system integrator firm specializing in the mid-market utility industry. Our team of experienced professionals helps utilities get the most out of their software investments by providing implementation, integration, and support services. Founded in 2013, USP offers the utilities industry a comprehensive range of services and software solutions. USP has been successfully servicing the utilities industry for more than a decade.
