Don't Miss This User Group Opportunity Launched at Collaborate 19

It has been a couple of weeks since the Collaborate 19 Conference in San Antonio, TX and we are still buzzing about the people we met, the connections made, and the general energy of it all!

After 2 days of testing, greeting many of your smiling faces in the testing room and the demo grounds, and participating in a panel discussion on Oracle Certification: Pathway to Success, we departed Collaborate 19 energized by our encounters and ready to meet you again at future conferences.

So many of you stopped by the Oracle University booth in the demo grounds to say hello and ask your questions in person about Oracle Certification, Learning Subscriptions, and other Oracle University training and learning options. 

We were pleased to be out from behind the screens that separate us and to be speaking to you face-to-face. It is not often that we get to participate in your testing and certification experience on such a personal level as being in the testing room with you.

We are reminded that our goal is really the same as yours - for you be better at what you do, and to gain all the benefits that go along with that.

You are learning Oracle technology and doing all kinds of great things with what you've learned! We want to continue to help you on that journey with value-packed training and exams, engaging communities, and support along the way.

To that end, in case you missed this announcement at the conference, through the end of 2019 User Group members receive a 25% discount on Oracle Certification Exams and Learning Subscriptions. 

To give you an idea of what a great deal this is, take the Unlimited Product Learning Subscription (UPLS) as an example. UPLS contains:

• Approximately 40 learning subscriptions
• Several collections of training on demand (TOD) courses
• Approximately 33 certification exams
• 12 months' access to hands on labs

Even better is the fact that as training is added and updated, you receive all the latest material through your subscription.

Oracle Enables Utilities to Embrace a Customer-Centric Future

The utility industry is undergoing a massive evolution as utility customers are becoming more active consumers and producers. The explosion of data from a multitude of devices, including meters, IoT sensors, and smart home appliances, require utilities to rethink old business and billing models to meet the demands of this new utility economy.

As such, Oracle continues to enhance its leading customer solutions platform to deliver the tools water, gas, and energy utilities need to address this changing market dynamic. With a modern user interface, deep analytics, and built-in integrations with operational device data management and customer self-service capabilities, utilities can better engage customers at scale. For example, they will be able to tap user interface innovations to target customers for new programs based on personalized information on their utility usage. The new features are now available across Oracle’s customer solutions, including Customer to Meter and Customer Cloud Service (CCS).

“In this new utility economy, the customer is transitioning from a billable account to a participant in the utility business model. With changes in rates, regulations, and production, customers are looking for more information regarding their usage and bill and how they can lessen the impact of both,” said Hillary Martin, senior director, Oracle Utilities. “Antiquated customer systems simply don’t allow utilities the flexibility and intelligence they need in this changing market paradigm. With our continued updates, Oracle is bringing utilities to the leading edge of innovation.”

Driving Customer Innovation at Scale

Customer Cloud Service brings together Oracle Utilities’ market-leading customer information system (CIS) and advanced meter data management capabilities into a single meter-to-cash-to-customer solution on a shared database and technology stack. By bringing metering, customer account and revenue data into a common view, enriched by deep analytics and data visualization tools, utilities can drive greater business value from the increasing amounts of data and convert it into actionable business insights.

Built on the Oracle Cloud and delivered as the industry’s first fully supported Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, CCS features automated patching, upgrades, security, and standard SaaS services—freeing up valuable utility resources. With CCS, utilities gain a complete view of their customers and significant cost reductions compared to managing two separate systems. 

With these new innovations, CCS and Customer to Meter utility customers can benefit from:

• User Experience Enhancements: Guided by dozens of years working closely with customers on their CIS initiatives, a decade of Opower behavioral science research and design best practices, Oracle customer solutions feature a new, clean and modern interface and improvements to the ways end users interact with data, insights, content and context. With guided workflows and intuitive design, even brand new customer service representatives can deliver the same level of service as long-term call center experts.
• Advanced Analytics: With the exponential growth in volumes and sources of data, utilities have an ever-expanding opportunity to derive value from that information to support better decisions across the business. With pre-built analytics embedded in both Oracle Utilities customer solutions, users can drive insight throughout the customer lifecycle. This allows utilities to visualize data clearly across systems and slice and dice to discover fresh insights that support customer engagement, revenue management, and more. With Oracle, utilities have the power of data science and machine learning at their fingertips, in pre-packaged solutions designed specifically for utility needs.
• Operational Device Management: enables utilities to track meter and device inventory and monitor performance from within the same system capturing meter reads and customer accounts. This customer-device-data integration in a single solution not only reduces technology costs for utilities but also provides a more complete, “single source of truth” picture across an increasingly distributed network. This helps utilities move beyond the meter to leverage data across all relevant devices so they can explore and scale to new connected home services and more.
• Digital Self Service: delivers a crucial component in providing modern customer experiences. By integrating Oracle Utilities Digital Self Service (DSS) and Oracle customer solutions, utilities can deliver superior service across channels and devices while driving down operating costs. In addition, based on a decade of user insights and design experience from Opower, Oracle DSS provides a strong web foundation to launch additional customer engagement programs. 

“Utility distribution is no longer a linear equation where a customer uses a resource and then is billed for it. With the industry’s most connected, end-to-end customer platforms, Oracle is enabling utilities to become trusted advisors in this new journey while modernizing operations for an evolving customer-centric utility future,” added Martin.

New Oracle Utilities Opower Cloud Service Enables Utilities to Engage Customers at the Grid Edge

As emerging energy sources—such as solar—compel customers to become more active participants in the grid, their energy management needs are getting more complex. Oracle is equipping utilities to serve as trusted advisors to these increasingly active customers with its new Oracle Utilities Opower Distributed Energy Resources Customer Engagement Cloud Service.

Available today, the offering initially provides rooftop solar customers helpful insight into their utility bills and energy savings and will expand to address other types of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the future such as electric vehicles and residential battery storage.

Oracle Utilities Opower DER Customer Engagement is one of four new products and more than 100 new features in the Opower platform, the industry’s leading suite of customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services. To learn more, visit today’s release here.

According to Wood Mackenzie, “Solar is the second fastest growing resource after natural gas in the U.S., and residential solar has grown by 500+MW every quarter over the last four years.” However, many early adopters have been dismayed with their expectation of utility bill savings versus the reality. This is resulting in an influx of calls to their utility provider, which have proven to be up to $8 more expensive and considerably longer than non-solar related calls.

Based on extensive research into the solar customer journey, Opower DER Customer Engagement addresses these challenges by providing utility customers with a personalized set of insights and recommendations relating to their overall energy generation, usage, and resulting bill.

“Engaging with our customers and providing them clear, consistent information about their energy consumption and production is critical,” said Feltrin Davis, Manager, Business Intelligence and Data Analytics Smart Energy Services, Exelon. “With Oracle, we have been able to regularly deploy new web tools for our solar/net energy meter customers and are updating them frequently to ensure we are providing the best experience possible.”

With Opower, Utilities can now send new solar customers onboarding communications explaining what to expect and how solar billing works. And new or existing customers can leverage online tools and insights to understand their net energy consumption. In addition, solar customers will also have a simple overview of their bills and a comparison of how their energy costs have changed since adopting solar. As a result, customers are happier and utilities reduce expensive call center volume.

“As distributed energy resources continue to rise, consumers are becoming more active and in control of their energy footprint – both as users and producers,” said Dan Byrnes, SVP of product development, Oracle Utilities. “They are looking to their utility to help guide them throughout this journey and provide the clear, accessible insights they need to make more informed decisions. This innovation is a critical step forward in enabling the kind of deeper relationship between utilities and their customers which is essential as the industry moves towards a more customer-centric grid model.”

This offering—the only of its kind on the market—is powered by the world’s largest residential energy data analytics platform with over 1.6 trillion meter reads from more than 60 million households and businesses, across 100 utilities.

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