Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.3.1 Demonstrates Extreme Performance on Oracle Exadata

As Utilities plan new service options and programs that respond to emerging customer and community needs, questions naturally arise about the ability of existing computer hardware, technology, and software applications to handle the new demands. Can utilities move forward with the confidence that today’s information infrastructure can perform functions like prepay, demand response, and customer portal access to near real-time data without sacrificing the rapid and dependable throughput of batch bills that ensures timely revenue flow?  Currently, few utilities – even those with highly advanced billing systems—can answer that questions definitively—and with good reason.  Financial prudence dictates that utilities structure IT to accommodate current needs. Thus, a utility using a monthly billing cycle typically sizes to accommodate 21 overnight billing runs per month plus an allowance for anticipated and unanticipated delays.  This sizing is unlikely to be a helpful measure of the potential to speed up billing in order to accommodate additional customer demands.  To help utilities gain a better sense of maximum billing and customer program performance, Oracle is conducting tests that run Oracle applications on Oracle Exadata and Exalogic.  The results permit utilities to measure their own systems’ performance and gauge their estimated future requirements against hardware and software available today. The test described in this paper – the first of many planned --- demonstrates that Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing can process routine customer bills on Oracle Exadata in a fraction of the time used by most utilities today, reducing overnight billing runs to a few minutes.