The city of Austin, Texas wanted a new utility services billing system that did more than just save money, streamline the process and expedite transactions. It wanted a system that also improved customer service and would meet green energy expectations.

That's a tall order. Just the first part is a tall order. But after reviewing technology solutions city IT officials chose to bring in IBM on an eight-year contract to deploy and administer what it hopes will be a technology game-changer all around when it comes to managing the city's water, electric and waste collection efforts.

The system will feature the Oracle Customer Care and Billing application running on IBM WebSphere and IBM Tivoli middleware. Its open architecture strategy will make the new system compatible with existing municipal IT systems and provide real-time information acess to external and internal users. IBM said the goal is to provide a single point of contact via many communication channels for customer access to products and services.

But the neatest aspect is that the new system, when combined with new meters, will create a smart electric grid in Central Texas. Smart grids, which help customers determine actual usage, can help users then manage energy use that results in lower costs, and help utilities respond quicker to outages and take advantage of more renewable energy sources.

IBM and the City of Austin are members of the Pecan Street Project (www.pecanstreetproject.org), a group of public and private partners including Austin Energy, Austin Technology Incubator, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, The University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, Dell, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, Microsoft, and, of course, Oracle. The organization is geared toward designing a clean energy infrastructure and business model .

The Texas grid effort is just one of 50 IBM smart grid engagements. You can learn more about other smart grid efforts and IBM's role at its Smarter Planet site.