To meet the rapidly changing demands of the utility industry, Xcel Energy is collaborating with Teradata Corp. to further develop its advanced analytics and user self-service capabilities. The initial scope of effort will combine the utility’s data on meters, billing, and collections, and enable detailed segmentation and powerful analytics.
“Xcel Energy is an industry leader when it comes to moving the energy grid into the modern age, and we need to be prepared to manage the massive amount of real-time data being generated,” said Michael Carlson, chief information officer, Xcel Energy. “We believe there will be a tremendous opportunity to leverage that information toward automating the management of the grid. This collaboration is expected to provide the scalability and performance we need for making smarter business decisions.”
The new Teradata system, which includes Teradata’s market-leading analytical software running on the recently introduced Teradata 5550 server, an active data warehouse-class platform, will be in production by late summer. In addition, Xcel Energy will employ a Teradata Logical Data Model being developed for the utility industry to represent enterprise data, data relationships, topic areas, and business rules.
“We are integrating data into a single environment to allow end-to-end views of our business and help us understand cause-effect relationships across our value chain,” said Brian Jore, director of business analytics, Xcel Energy. “This centralized environment will allow our analysts and business users to identify ways to maximize revenue recovery, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.”
In the past Xcel Energy required information to be pulled from different sources and pieced together to give a static picture of the business. With this new solution, the company will be able to quickly and easily answer inter- and intra-department and business unit questions.
