By Jamal Syed, HEXstream president and CEO 

Last week we shared an update about our co-development of Oracle’s Energy and Water Data Intelligence platform. This is big news–we’re very excited about the initiative–and as I’ve been focusing on this platform one of the aspects that jumps out at me is its unique ability to align data from back office and business operations, which generates meaningful data insights in a manner we haven’t seen before.  

We have witnessed increasing efforts from utilities to dismantle data silos between their various operations. Some are doing a terrific job with this, others not so much. It is not uncommon to see data from, say, customer experience joined with asset and distribution data; the result is clearer vision into these processes and more reliable performance overall. Or consider the example of smart-meter data being combined with real-time outage data and asset-health data, resulting in enhanced customer service, more accurate preventive maintenance and better load balancing.  

The possibilities of these data alignments seem endless. With EWDI we can properly merge HR and finance data with field-service data or asset-maintenance services to assess how skills-enhancement programs are truly improving crews’ field service. This smarter data alignment provides unprecedented analysis of, say, the financial impact of downed assets or system failures.  

Prior to our launch of EWDI there was no single platform to effectively bring these pools of utility operational data together. We could not previously maintain cohesiveness between these disparate groups of data.  

We now can.  

EWDI is built upon Oracle’s most comprehensive and time-tested cloud-based platform—Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI), which has been used across industries for years in the back office to create common enterprise-information models. Now the same foundation is being used to optimize EWDI. We can deliver universal data models that easily extend to include all types of data.  

And because EWDI is cloud-based, utilities no longer have to worry about building and maintaining systems large enough to hold this much data while servicing millions of users at the same time. Similarly, cloud computing provides elasticity, meaning that utilities can expand the system during dark-sky periods to accommodate more users but can contract again when usage is low, which saves them money. And above all, it eliminates the single point of failure.

CLICK HERE TO CONNECT WITH US ABOUT CAPITALIZING ON EWDI AT YOUR UTILITY.