Multinational Smart Metering Company Optimizes TCO with Tessell as its Digital Backbone

Company Background

This Global Fortune 4000 company is a multinational corporation specializing in energy management solutions. Headquartered in Switzerland, the company is a global leader in smart metering systems, grid edge intelligence, and other advanced infrastructure services for utilities. Their products and services enable utilities to manage energy better, improve efficiency, and reduce environmental impact. The company operates in over 30 countries and serves a wide range of clients, including electric, gas, and water utilities. Through its innovative solutions, the company plays a crucial role in the transition to a more sustainable energy future.

The Challenge

As the leading smart meter technology provider in the world, Tessell’s smart metering customer provides a scalable infrastructure for monitoring and analytics of electricity consumption.  Rising energy demand is a secular trend, McKinsey projects that power consumption will triple by 2050 as electrification and living standards grow.  Consequently, Tessell’s customer sits at the center of this global secular transformation.  Grid edge intelligence and smart infrastructure technology are key to day-to-day operations for their utility customers as they look to obtain real-time grid monitoring, growth planning and management.  This smart metering company’s business objectives are to both improve the scalability, provide real-time analytics as well as at better utilizing their data as their business responds to hyper-growth.

Technical Drivers

Collecting, and scaling real-time smart meter telemetry for 4.5 million end-users required Tessell’s customer to reimagine their enterprise architecture. Throughput with low latency at scale became a fundamental consideration. Tessell’s smart metering customer was experiencing application latency and application crashing under peak load.  Consequently, application availability, throughput, and data-ingestion latency were the three key business KPIs for the proof-of-concept success criteria.
Tessell’s smart meter customer concluded that it was architecturally optimal to move to Microsoft Azure and adopt a utility edge networking strategy than it was to scale their two-datacenter (Switzerland & Finland) hub architecture.  Furthermore, the Azure platform would enable Tessell’s customer to meet data sovereignty regulations as it expanded into additional countries. Consequently, this smart metering company selected Azure as its strategic Cloud and made an aggressive commitment to exit all of its data centers in nine months, by December 2024.

The Assessment Process

Customer discovery of the IT estate identified Oracle Utilities packaged applications: Oracle Meter Data Management (MDM) and Oracle Head End System (HES).  These packaged applications run in WebLogic containers backed by Oracle Databases to persist smart-meter telemetry and analytic data.  Microsoft Premier Oracle on Azure Partner: Tessell was engaged as a PaaS solution and proved a superior total cost of ownership (TCO) for day 2+ database lifecycle operations. 
A current state vs proposed future-state Azure architecture was built out from the customer discovery. Tessell engaged in multiple technical deep dives across database, data, security, architecture, and cloud to showcase modernization benefits.  A corresponding TCO analysis was created to illustrate potential cost savings.  Most importantly, a long-term POC simulation took place on Azure so that the smart meter company could see real-world numbers and develop confidence that they could achieve zero-downtime high availability, high data-ingestion throughput and low-latency data processing.  The POC successfully demonstrated that Oracle Packaged Applications could be moved to Azure and meet the technical success criteria.

Proof of Concept

The technical pilot took place over a 3-month period.  This enabled the smart meter company to:

1. Obtain real-world data on uptime, throughput, and sub-one-second latency data with an Azure POC
2. Prove future scale-out capability with configurable disk IOPS.  The current configuration leveraged premium SSDv2.
3. Identify infrastructure bottlenecks that were impeding the throughput and causing data-processing latency.  An upgrade and migration to the Linux operating system played a significant role in increased processing efficiency and reduced infrastructure requirements.
4. Obtain a technical line-of-site to exiting their two data centers by December 2024
5. Obtain training with the Tessell Platform as part of the engagement
   

Customer Results & Business Impact

 The “Lift & Shine” of the Oracle footprint from two data centers to Azure resulted in:

• An improvement of application availability above 99.99%. Tessell’s 3-month proof-of-concept identified bottlenecks at the infrastructure level.  Under load, oversubscribed CPUs pegged at 100% utilization caused intermittent data-ingestion latency and application crashing.  The operating system migration brought CPU utilization to 60% enabling consistent data-ingestion latency and eliminated application crashing.
• Automated patching and upgrade resulted in DBAs saving 60% of the time and labor.  Consequently, DBAs reallocated their time to strategic initiatives aligned with company growth.  This included both deriving insights from data but also geographic and customer expansion.

FinOps Savings

In addition to operational savings, direct costs were dropped to the bottom line:

• TCO Savings – Tessell provided a Total Cost of Ownership with a 50% reduction in the IT infrastructure estate and 60% time-and-labor improvement.
• An additional $100k reduction in license support cost
• Capability to meet data residency requirements enabled by Microsoft Azure’s global data center footprint
• Exiting on-premises data center resulted in 50% infrastructure savings optimized with Microsoft Azure Consumption Credits (MACC) and long-term reserved Azure compute instances.
• Exiting their datacenter on-time