SE Helps Leader Scale Smart Meter Solution
BI and Predictive Analytics Case Study
Market Segment: Smart Grid Technology / Power & Utility
Introduction
This customer is a global provider and pioneer of metering, data collection and utility software solutions for the Power & Utility industry. The company hired Scalability Experts (SE) to help them improve the scalability, availability and performance (scale up to 2 million customer meters per day) of their Microsoft based BI software product suite. The product provides software tools and predictive analytic capabilities critical to realizing the benefits and value of Smart Grid technology. An operator using predictive analytics to manage their Smart Grid operations helps them to:
- Improve energy conservation
- Aggregate multiple supply sources of alternative clean energy
- Enable consumer empowerment so that the end-user can lower their monthly usage costs
- Reduce equipment failure and outages
The customer was skeptical at first if the Microsoft BI platform stack could effectively scale to significantly higher data volumes and with them being behind on their development schedule they considered other platform options for their product. With several Utilities already using an early version of the product, they decided to further investigate the capabilities of the Microsoft BI platform and called in Scalability Experts to evaluate the architecture and to make changes to their product.
Problem/Opportunity
The SE engagement to improve the performance of the customer’s BI product suite included the assessment, design and application development for their:
- Data Warehouse
- Meter Read Data Processing
The BI and predictive analytics product suite represents a key component used by the customer to differentiate themselves in the market and a way for them to gain a competitive edge. Their solution leverages the Microsoft’s Smart Grid Reference Architecture, uses the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and runs on SQL Server. It was a critical path item that they needed to quickly fix to maintain their go-to-market advantage.
Solution/Capabilities
During the initial Scalability Analysis (Performance Lab) completed by SE, the following areas were identified as requiring improvements:
- Slow load times for meter readings
- Overuse of disk resources to store all components of data
- Redundant Indexes
- Redundant or non-batch processing loading data
- Archival of historical data did not exist
It was determined that the current Architecture needed to be streamlined to allow faster data loads. The system also needed to scale to handle more than 50 million meter readings daily. Significant design and coding changes were made to improve the performance of their product suite.
Results
Due to SE’s expertise and BI application development skills, SE proved to the customer that the product and the Microsoft BI platform stack could be optimized to scale to required levels. Based on SE’s recommendations, the company decided to complete the build-out plan and to roll-out their enhanced version of their product suite to the marketplace in May of this year. SE’s work on their product improved the company’s speed to market and has ensured that they would have a new Microsoft BI platform based product suite to offer that scales to significantly higher volume levels. The customer anticipates that once launched into the market the new version will help:
- Reinforce the company’s leadership position in innovation
- Position the company to penetrate new global markets
- Will be a robust and superior alternative to other BI platforms offered by competitors
SE resources
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