In Conversation with Tom Van Haute, CEO of Ferranti

Ferranti has spent decades building the operational backbone that energy and utility providers depend on. Tom Van Haute has been part of that story for exactly 30 years. Joining Ferranti as a developer when the company had just 35 employees, he played a pivotal role in its international expansion and transformation into a leading provider of utility software. As CEO of Ferranti, Tom is now leading Ferranti into its next phase of growth and innovation, working closely with Main Capital Partners to build on the company’s strong foundations.

We spoke with Tom about what sets Ferranti apart, the growing complexity facing energy and utility providers, and how Ferranti is leveraging AI to build a more innovative and resilient business.

The operational backbone of the energy sector

Ferranti provides the software infrastructure that energy and utility providers rely on to run their day-to-day operations: from metering and market communication to billing and customer service. Its flagship product, MECOMS 365, is an end-to-end platform built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure, covering the full meter-to-cash process across electricity, gas, water, and heating.

“We sit at the heart of our customers’ business,” Van Haute explains. “MECOMS is mission-critical: if it stops, everything stops, from metering to market communication to invoicing.”

That level of criticality creates lasting relationships. Many of Ferranti’s customer partnerships stretch well over a decade, deepening over time as utilities extend their use of the platform and their needs evolve.

Managing complexity at scale

Decentralization is reshaping what utilities must be capable of. Smart meters are generating data every 15 minutes. Dynamic tariffs are turning pricing from a billing detail to a core product offering. Flexibility markets are emerging to manage growing grid congestion. And each European market runs its own regulatory framework, on its own timeline.

“Our customers are managing complexity on three fronts at once,” Van Haute says. “Regulatory complexity, operational accuracy at scale, and commercial pressure – all at the same time.”

Ferranti’s answer is to absorb that complexity into the platform itself, so utilities can focus on customers and new products rather than rebuilding their core every time a market changes its rules. MECOMS ships a new release every three weeks on a single code base, keeping every customer on the same current version, an unusual degree of agility for Enterprise Software of this depth.

According to Van Haute, “The companies that win in this environment won’t be the ones with the cleverest tariff on a slide. They’ll be the ones who can actually measure, communicate, bill, and service it reliably, at scale, in every market they operate in.”

A partnership built on software expertise

Ferranti’s partnership with Main Capital marks the company’s first institutional investment and the beginning of a new growth chapter.

“Main speaks the software language,” Van Haute says. “You don’t have to explain how a software business works, because they have lived it many times over. And we were genuinely surprised by how sharp their view of the utility sector was at the initial engagement.”

In practical terms, the partnership unlocks buy-and-build capability that Ferranti was never able to explore previously – complementary products, adjacent utility domains, and new geographies – supported by Main’s in-house expertise in sourcing and integrating acquisitions. It also opens access to the broader Main portfolio of nearly 60 B2B software companies, and the accumulated knowledge on go-to-market strategy, pricing and packaging, and accelerating top-line growth that comes with it.

Investing in AI

Ferranti is investing in artificial intelligence across three areas. Internally, it is rolling out developer tooling including GitHub Copilot and evaluating how to bring additional models into its development workflows securely. For its own teams, it has built a MECOMS AI Assistant that allows staff to query product documentation conversationally, a particularly valuable tool for onboarding new colleagues.

Most significantly, Ferranti is developing AI capabilities for customers, working closely with Microsoft to build assisted-AI tools and MCP servers that enable natural-language interaction with utility data. It is also building its first AI agents in collaboration with key customers, with plans to accelerate that work in the coming months.

“We have seen a real acceleration here over the last half year,” Van Haute says. “Working hand in hand with Microsoft, we are creating a lot of interest and genuine enthusiasm among our customers.”

Looking ahead

A decade from now, Van Haute wants Ferranti to be a leading European software provider across the broader utilities landscape: larger, more international, and with AI woven into the core of the product.

“What drives me personally is happy people and happy customers. And I want to do that in a way that we keep the special Ferranti DNA across all our wider communities – a culture of engineering, innovation and agility.”

“If we can make the energy transition genuinely operable for our customers and build a resilient business where talented people do their best work, I’ll consider the job done well.”