Micetro for Utility 2.0

How are utility companies striving to meet new customer expectations? It's all about Utility 2.0, or for those of us in the IT industry - digital transformation and connectivity.

What is Utility 2.0?

A few weeks ago I received emails from my electric, gas, and Internet service providers telling me that we were about to get a really nasty cold front (-25 F with windchill) and that I might lose power, heat, and Internet. On top of that, they all noted that I should be making emergency kits and what I should pack in those emergency kits should any of the above happen. I'll admit I was surprised and delighted to receive these kinds of emails.

This is the idea behind Utility 2.0, putting the customer first, and it makes a lot of sense in this current iteration of the Experience Economy. Utility 2.0 has been around for quite a few years (dating back to 2013 or 2014), but we're just now starting to see the results of moving from a business model of raising prices and encouraging more energy usage to a model of actually encouraging savings on energy and providing things like home energy audits and other services to tech savvy and price conscious customers.

Going even beyond home audits to make suggestions on energy savings, utility companies are providing products and services, creating new revenue streams for the industry. Such products and services may include:

• Energy Star Appliances and other energy efficient products
• Incentives for buying energy efficient products or including energy efficient processes for businesses and homeowners
• Education and referral programs along with home assessments
• Rebates for commercial efficiency programs along with commercial assessments for HVAC and lighting

In fact, in New York we're seeing programs like the Energy Efficiency, Beneficial Electrification, & Demand Response Plan which proposed a budget of $93.15 million in 2022 to achieve these product and service proposals.

What does this have to do with IT?

In short, this is all about technology and connectivity. It would be completely inefficient to hire people to do all of these assessments manually as well as build in new efficient processes to create energy savings sustainably. So again, the onus comes back to IT to manage this kind of digital transformation with the few resources currently on IT teams.

In order to achieve Utility 2.0, then, we have to give utility IT providers the solutions they need, such as:

• IoT devices everywhere, including at the meter for homes and businesses, to enable automatic home assessments and monitoring as well as neighbor comparisons
• The ability to bring new apps and services to market quickly with improved self-service for cross-functional teams
• Sustainable control and visibility for their entire network from a GUI and APIs
• Built-in documentation for compliance and reporting
• Integrations with the legacy and modern solutions they're already using and plan to use
• Centralized audit trails for troubleshooting

How do they go about implementing, tracking, and managing all of these solutions, though?

Better Living through Simplified Operations

Some people call it Digital Transformation, others call it multicloud, the new term is Super Cloud. No matter what you call it, though, the main driver behind all of these buzzword architectures is providing a better operational experience (for IT) which then begets a better external customer experience.

IT teams at utility companies are in a more difficult place when compared to other industries like Retail or Media - even Finance or Health Care these days. The pressure is on to modernize systems at Utility companies, but in some cases there's no way to accomplish this without integrating required legacy systems, at least at this time.

Therefore, we have to be able to abstract and centralize our network management system(s) so that we have full visibility, observability, and control no matter if a device is in the cloud, on-premises, or an IoT device on a meter or other legacy device at someone's house 20 minutes away.

Providing Centralization of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI)

DNS, DHCP, and IP are often referred to as "common services" because literally every single person who is connected to a network is using likely all three of these protocols. If DNS goes down or becomes inaccessible for some reason, your entire service or site will be down. If DHCP stops working, your users can't connect. If you don't have some idea where your devices are and what your IP schema looks like for your entire environment then troubleshooting becomes nearly impossible.

Micetro is an overlay DDI solution that let's you manage your entire environment from one place, through the GUI or through the API. We reduce that technical debt paralysis and integrate with everyone, because we believe in making solutions sustainable. So while we extend the life of legacy services, we also make it easy to migrate to new services while continuing to work from the same management app.

If you're interested in seeing how Micetro can help you achieve your Utility 2.0 goals, check it out for yourself! We're confident that you'll enjoy how intuitive and how easy it is to use Micetro. As Daniel Döring said in our case study with the HBPO Group:

Sign up for the Free Trial any time and then watch our YouTube Deployment video playlist to get started!