Reduction in Tco While Achieving 100% Visibility

The energy company was implementing smart meters across its customer base and placed a significant emphasis on performance, particularly in preventing outages and service degradations to customers. However, the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) service, i.e. the smart meters, relied heavily on network communications, making the company’s back-end infrastructure and applications subject to performance issues. The IT team needed critical visibility into the company’s virtual servers, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and collection engines across distributed data centers, all without having to move between different tools. After the AMI project was implemented, IT faced pressure to improve their troubleshooting abilities for several other business application services including Microsoft Office 365, the Outage Management System (OMS) and Crew Management System. The company needed to ensure quality VoIP services - especially from remote sites and the customer facing contact centers.

The customer is one of the largest energy companies in the United States, providing electrical generation, transmission and delivery to millions of customers across multiple states. The company manages nearly a dozen electric utility operating companies and has subsidiaries that trade energy commodities in the deregulated markets. The company was in the process of implementing smart meters across its customer base, with a significant emphasis on performance, particularly in preventing outages and service degradations to customers. The rollout of smart meters was seen as highly beneficial for both consumers and the business, allowing consumers to take advantage of lower rates by adjusting their utility usage during times of peak demand and implementing devices such as the Nest thermostat to automatically adjust usage. At the same time, more accurate usage information would enable the company to reduce spikes and valleys making it easier and more cost effective to manage energy production, as well as help avoid outages.