COVER STORY GAME-CHANGERS IN THE UTILITY INDUSTRY: BRINGING DATA MANAGEMENT TO CLOUD LEVEL Listed as no. 1 of European Utility Week in November last year – “the Rockstar of the show” – Energyworx has created quite some buzz in the international utility market. In 2015, we will certainly see more of this company, if not for the fact that it has recently been included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Time to have a closer look at what it is that makes them change the way things are done so far, and create major opportunities for utilities to master mountains of big data. Let’s start at the beginning: the data issue. As energy systems change around the world, access to detailed information is being used to implement energy efficiency, grid balancing systems, and build better relationships with the ever emancipating customer. More smart meter systems are rolled out across the world and increased processing power to master big data is going to be key to future energy challenges. The question is whether local data centres and conventional software will be able to process data at the level of scale that will be necessary in the near future. ‘Our database technology is very different from the established companies and that is why we are currently outperforming them when it comes to scale,’ says Edwin Poot, Energyworx’s Chief Executive Officer. Energyworx’ processing power The configuration of the Energyworx’ database system is designed like that used by Twitter and Facebook – allowing for multiple connections and users being able to access the timeline information simultaneously, without affecting performance. Crunching is the word they use for this technology. An important features of the cloud services that Energyworx uses is that WHAT’S GOOGLE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Google Cloud Platform is Energyworx’ technology partner. Their system is completely cloud enabled. Building an application and hosting it on a virtual machine in the cloud, by other companies, often referred to as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is completely different to what Energyworx is doing. ‘We don’t have anything to do with infrastructure. We don’t want to maintain servers.’ This allows Energyworx to focus on what they are good at, and for Google to do the same. ‘So we deploy production ready and tested releases in a software container with shorter release cycles. The cloud service provider handles the rest. We don’t have to worry about scalability or storage expansion. This is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) at its best!’ Poot explains. This allows Energyworx to focus on what they are good at, and for Google to do the same. We only have to focus on developing exciting features and releasing it Changing sentiments around cloud solutions Recently, Google Cloud Platform has recently been PCI Data Security Standard Certified. This standard provides a comprehensive and robust security framework for securing credit card information and transactions. Certifications such as these will further turn around the sentiment around security risks with cloud solutions, as it is already becoming more and more accepted in various sectors. METERING INTERNATIONAL ISSUE – 6 | 2014 15