Energy company Centrica has rolled out a new data analytics warehouse to consolidate and integrate its growing data volumes.
The new appliance was supplied by data analytics company Teradata and will allow the utility company to migrate many of its existing databases to a data warehouse hosted on the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance. It chose Teradata after a 12-month evaluation of other companies in the market involving consultations with analysts, requests for quotes and proposals alongside reference visits with existing Teradata customers.
The consolidation and centralisation of numerous under-used, disparate data marts has resulted in data and analytics being more efficiently shared from one, centralised data warehouse among thousands of users, according to Teradata.
The gas and electric company will also use applications running on the new infrastructure to analyse customer data and energy usage.
“Data volumes are growing with new data types such as browsing data and smart meter data and these are driving new insight. It is vital that Centrica have a technology partner who is proven in this field,” said David Cooper, chief information officer at Centrica.
The company has also purchased Teradata’s Logical Data Model for the Utilities Industry product to help the company organise data to make them accessible, enable reuse of data in other applications, highlight data integrity problems and provides comprehensive documentation of the form’s data. As well as this purchase, Centrica has bought the Teradata Analytical Applications for Customer Management and Data Mining.
Hermann Wimmer, EMEA president of Teradata said that Centrica was one of the fastest growing businesses for the company as enterprises such as Centrica were heavily regulated by governments and had a duty to help customers cut down their use of energy. He said it was unlike a lot of other companies where the main focus was to get customers to spend more money.
“In the utility industry you need your customer to spend less on energy and sometimes you need to be able to change customer behaviour. There is two-way communication between the utility company and the consumer so that the company can tell them what they are spending and how he could even reduce their bill,” Wimmer said.
