Itron Inc. has formed a development partnership with SAP AG to offer a complete, pre-integrated solution for the collection, management, analysis, billing, and customer service for multiple vendors’ smart metering/advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems. SAP has 33% of the market share of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and 65% for CIS for utilities outside of the United States and nearly 20 percent domestically.

Itron will provide the technical integration with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)/smart meter systems and deliver commercial-ready meter data and key analytic tools to SAP applications. SAP will provide financial, billing, customer service and related commercial processes such as market messaging integration, energy settlement and enterprise asset management.

This solution will solve the many systems challenges posed by smart metering systems such as the operation of multiple vendor collection systems, large volumes of interval data, remote disconnect/reconnect, on-demand reads, complex billing calculations, and asset management. The approach will use web services integration between Itron’s flagship meter data management product (Itron Enterprise Edition) and the energy data management, customer relationship and billing, market messaging, and asset management capabilities of SAP applications.

The partnership will allow seamless access to metering devices regardless of the technology and end-to-end integration of technical and commercial business processes within the utilities industry. The solution will help the customer cover all processes from the meter to the backend system.