As a highly regulated service provider, the utility’s primary obligation is uninterrupted provision of services without price increases due to unforeseen demand. With an enterprise data hub, service providers are able to converge complete streaming data from multiple sources in full fidelity. Where purpose-built systems historically lagged notifications provided by customer complaints, analytics and visualization based on Hadoop tools provide a real-time view of outages and their causes so that the utility can fully comprehend the extent of a reliability issue and respond accordingly, often even before the impact can be observed by consumers. In addition to reliability and consistency in the delivery of services, utilities are shifting their focus to optimizing voltage in anticipation of demand. Service providers are using big data to prioritize control of both capital expenditure and existing resource management, as well as to prevent spiky increases in customer pricing.
