On Friday the 28th annual CIS Conference concluded in Miami
Beach. The conference had approximately 1,250 attendees
and over 100 exhibitors focused on one of the utility and
energy industry's most critical areas—customer service.
The conference hosted over fifty workshops on the various
issues facing utilities today including customer information
systems (CIS), customer relationship management (CRM), call
centers, outsourcing, metering, and automated meter reading
(AMR).
Besides the speeches and presentations that the CIS Conference
provided, it is also served as a platform for many of the
conference's participants to make major announcements. Let's
take a look at a few of the more major news items.
Customer & Product Announcements
The CIS Conference has always served as a great
forum for CIS providers to announce their latest agreements.
The largest deal announced at this year's conference was
Conversant, Inc.'s agreement with ECONnergy Energy Company,
Inc. (ECONnergy). Customer Watch, Conversant's CIS software
for billing and managing customer information, was selected
by ECONnergy, a privately held New York Corporation that
is one of the largest independent marketers in the Northeast.
ECONnergy provides electric and gas service to more than
300,000 customers in a four state area.
In its selection of Conversant, ECONnergy noted that it
had required a system that is able to grow with the company,
and flexible enough to support rapid entry into new markets.
ECONnergy also noted that it was looking for a CIS that
has the functionality to enable superior service. According
to Saul Horowitz, ECONnergy Chief Executive Officer, the
company expects to meet all of these requirements with Customer
Watch, “and at a price that is extremely competitive.”
The CIS Conference has also always served as a great forum
for CIS providers to unveil their latest product offerings.
The most anticipated new product offering at this year's
conference was Peace Software's unveiling of Peace 8. Peace
Software considers the new product to be at the forefront
of the utility industry's evolution from custom-developed
billing systems towards a true CIS software product.
Peace 8 supports utility best practice customer and revenue
management for operational efficiency and growth in regulated
and competitive markets. Peace 8 is scalable and flexible
to support all business models and any size customer base.
It provides a single platform for regulated and competitive
utilities that can consolidate all customers, jurisdictions,
markets and products. Its client architecture also lends
itself to outsourcing and distributed deployment.
Peace 8 components include Customer Acquisition, Customer
Care, Online Self-Service, Complete Billing, Receivables
and Collections, Market Transactions, and Usage Reconciliation.
Financial Dealings
On the financial front, Innoprise Software, Inc.,
an enterprise software company providing solutions for the
utility and local government markets, announced that it
had closed a $4 million Series A round of financing. The
lead investor of the round was ArrowPath Venture Partners
of Menlo Park, CA.
For the last two years, Innoprise Software has teamed with
a core group of customers and concentrated all of its resources
on developing next generation software for CIS, financial
management, community development, and work management.
According to Innoprise Software, the new software is based
on Java and Internet technologies that enable customers
to reduce their cost of service, streamline operations and
improve productivity.
“Most utilities and government agencies are running
monolithic legacy systems that were designed and implemented
many years ago,” said Tom Bevilacqua, managing partner
at ArrowPath Venture Partners. "Not only are these
legacy systems costly and difficult to modify and maintain,
but in many cases they pose a severe risk to the entity's
ability to meet its business objectives. Innoprise Software
has developed a product suite that delivers significant
cost efficiencies and enhanced capabilities to its customers.
The company will use the proceeds of its Series A funding
to bring this product suite to market.”
San Francisco-based SPL WorldGroup announced the largest
acquisition of the conference with its purchase of Atlanta-based
CES International, a provider of Outage Management (OMS)
and Energy Delivery Management (EDM) software. With this
acquisition SPL WorldGroup (SPL) has taken its CIS product
focus and is putting its stake in the ground as a multi-product
utility software suite supplier.
“The synergies between the value proposition of the
two companies and the combined suite of products encompassing
CIS, OMS, and EDM is quite compelling,” says Jon T.
Brock, COO of UtiliPoint International. Utilities have for
years recognized that one of the keys to operational efficiency
has been to tie the knot between the business of customer
service with the business of electricity distribution and
power delivery. In the early days this meant doing very
creative things like tying CIS to OMS and asset management
systems, and utilizing the data to populate utility operational
mapping systems and then doing a lot of manual run around
to communicate with line crews and customers. “In
today's more sophisticated utility IT environment where
the touch points between CIS and OMS are less numerous,
and the relationships between utility back office systems
like OMS and Workflow Management and Scheduling (WMS) and
proactive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and communication
are to define, and simpler to integrate with one another
the power, and value, of the proposition of a product suite
offering has become more tenable,” Brock added.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence based rule that
would make this acquisition look like a bad deal there is
a real question out there about what the right business
approach and most appropriate business model for a utility
technology supplier should be. The question is difficult
to answer because there will likely be utilities who have
different expectations of vendors and different needs. However,
what seems clear is that acquisitions like this one change
the dynamics of the utility information technology market
from a competitive environment that differentiates based
on price to one that can be esteemed on the basis of performance
and capability.
This is the second straight month that SPL has made a major
announcement. Last month, the company announced that Cobb
Energy, a for-profit affiliate of Cobb Electric Membership
Cooperative, had selected its CorDaptix billing and customer
care system to serve more than 250,000 customers in five
counties north of Atlanta, Georgia.
The CIS Conference has always served as a source of the
latest information, a wellspring of insight, and an unbeatable
networking opportunity. This year it provided these elements
in abundance.
