Oracle Utilities Opower Energy Efficiency Cloud Service
Likelihood to Recommend
Oracle Meter Data Management is very well suited for exactly what its called, Data Management. It stores our data accurately and historically in the database and does a good job of signaling errors if and when incorrect data, or what is perceived to be incorrect data is found. You can check on the history of meters and other devices, whether that be location, data, readings, voltage, usage, etc... I would say MDM would not be as well suited for the Customer Information data management. Although you can find some of this in MDM, it is not built for this type of usage.
Opower is a good tool. I don't have any real problems with it other than the fact that we have to run 4 batch programs to supply them with all the data they need. Any reduction in custom programs is a big win for my company as the cost of ownership is high.
Integration-wise, MDM is flawless with CCB, but the amount of time it takes to load and interpret daily reads is nearly prohibitive. Through a process called "meter interrogation," Oracle is supposed to process initial reads into final measurements. This is supposed to run three times a day, but because the process is so resource-intensive, we are only able to run it barely twice a day. Production resources lag during this time and user experience is reduced.
The amount of data the MDM require to be kept in just two of the thousands of database tables indicates a very poor design, or at least a poor integration of the Lodestar product that they purchased and turned into MDM. The initial measurements and final measurements tables take up around 85 to 90 percent of the database. This bloatedness in database size translates into slower performance for the front-end user as well as real costs in terms of data storage. Any user using Oracle's Exadata software will pay dearly for not having a purge and archive strategy.
We have to run multiple batch programs to generate the extract files for Opower.
The extract process is a little inefficient.
We receive communication from multiple parties at Opower when there are issues. If issues came from 1 email address, that would be helpful. This is very nit-picky though.
I feel the overall support has been great, oracle employees are easy to work with, quick to answer, and very knowledgeable. If they don't have an answer for support you might need, they are eager to find the right path to get the solution.
Support is good. I work with 2 or 3 people at Opower when something goes wrong with our reported data. They respond in a timely manner with meaningful information. The only thing that might be helpful is to have any responses come to use via 1 common email address like support@opower.com so I can easily recognize that there's an Opower problem.
Although I have minimal experience with meter data management products outside of MDM, it does perform better than an in-house product developed by our utility 20 years ago for use on our mainframe-based system then. Meter management is headed the same way as other industries in terms of data usage and mining. The requirement for data is only going to continue to increase, and at this time it appears that MDM is only just keeping up with those requirements. Oracle has done a great job of purchasing products and integrating them into their overall framework, but the current database structure of MDM lends itself to poor performance if Oracle's own hardware is not purchased, and if their purge and archive strategy (i.e. ILM) is not employed.
I haven't reviewed or used any tools like Opower before. I've only been using the service for a year or so and find it to be straight forward. I don't see any real issues with it and the fact that it's now an Oracle product means that base integrations with the rest of the Utility Suite would be possible in the future.
