Case Study: Osaka Gas achieves greater reliability and better cost management with Liferay

Japanese gas company's corporate intranet broadens scope of online services

Osaka Gas, a leading energy supplier serving nearly 7 million customers in Japan’s Kansai region, faced a growing intranet problem: its commercial portal aggregated many disparate applications and content but over time became slow and unreliable—causing frequent system slowdowns and twice-weekly reboots—and had a cluttered link-heavy interface. With the vendor contract ending, upgrading the tied enterprise suite or scaling obsolete hardware proved impractical or prohibitively expensive.

The company replaced the legacy portal with open-source Liferay, integrated by Osaka Gas Information System Research Institute (OGIS), which allowed a back-end overhaul with minimal UI disruption thanks to flexible theming and JSR-168 support. The new platform delivered better reliability and cost management, granular role/portlet controls, easy page customization, and smooth integration via web services with existing collaboration tools, enabling quick scaling across subsidiaries and ongoing plans to expand and further increase availability.

Osaka Gas

Shigeru Nonami

Manager of Information & Communication Systems