Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) vs. Oracle Utilities Opower Energy Efficiency Cloud Service

Oracle Utilities MDM is well suited for users that have plenty of money to invest in technical hardware resources to support the requirements of this application. With the electric utility industry becoming more and more precise data-wise, the requirements for data storage and processing are only going to increase. For example, electrical usage measurement used to be a once-a-month practice; in the 1990s, hourly reading was introduced; recently, 15-minute interval readings have been introduced and will become the new norm. Going from one reading a month, to 720, to now 2,880 requires expensive hardware. MDM is able to handle this load, in our experience, only if you purchase Oracle's Exadata hardware, which is priced at a premium. Beyond data storage itself, we have also found that MDM real-time usage for users is also, unfortunately, best with Exadata. Likely because Oracle developed this hardware, and because it has built-in compression, portioning, and tuning features, performance is better. One note is that Oracle does provide a purge-and-archive strategy in the more recent versions of MDM (i.e. ILM). However, implementation of this is a small project in itself, although worthwhile in the long run.

Incentivized

Opower is a good tool. I don't have any real problems with it other than the fact that we have to run 4 batch programs to supply them with all the data they need. Any reduction in custom programs is a big win for my company as the cost of ownership is high.

Incentivized

• Data Management is crucial and MDM does this well
• Device Configuration organization
• Readings, usage, measurement units, service points, device management

Incentivized

• Provides week over week data to customers in an email.
• Provides suggestions to customers to curtail their usage and save money.
• Presents the data in an easy to read format.

Incentivized

• In some ways, MDM is too customizable. There is a delicate balance to be struck between allowing implementers the ability to create custom algorithms to meet their business needs and making those features part of the base product. Lots of things can go wrong if you customize it too much.
• The cost/time to upgrade is very high.
• Cost of ownership is very high.

Incentivized

• We have to run multiple batch programs to generate the extract files for Opower.
• The extract process is a little inefficient.
• We receive communication from multiple parties at Opower when there are issues. If issues came from 1 email address, that would be helpful. This is very nit-picky though.

Incentivized

We get prompt responses from support, but sometimes solutions take weeks or even months to come.

Incentivized

Support is good. I work with 2 or 3 people at Opower when something goes wrong with our reported data. They respond in a timely manner with meaningful information. The only thing that might be helpful is to have any responses come to use via 1 common email address like support@opower.com so I can easily recognize that there's an Opower problem.

Incentivized

Although I have minimal experience with meter data management products outside of MDM, it does perform better than an in-house product developed by our utility 20 years ago for use on our mainframe-based system then. Meter management is headed the same way as other industries in terms of data usage and mining. The requirement for data is only going to continue to increase, and at this time it appears that MDM is only just keeping up with those requirements. Oracle has done a great job of purchasing products and integrating them into their overall framework, but the current database structure of MDM lends itself to poor performance if Oracle's own hardware is not purchased, and if their purge and archive strategy (i.e. ILM) is not employed.

Incentivized

I haven't reviewed or used any tools like Opower before. I've only been using the service for a year or so and find it to be straight forward. I don't see any real issues with it and the fact that it's now an Oracle product means that base integrations with the rest of the Utility Suite would be possible in the future.

Incentivized

• Preventing errors for us always turns into money saved. Error flags that MDM throws help to prevent incorrect data entry, which almost always turns into money and time spent on sending somebody out into the field to ensure accurate data was given. So by not allowing for the possible errors, we save money.
• No Negative Impacts.

Incentivized

• We are able to fulfill our state regulatory requirements fairly easily with the tool.
• The reporting to Opower is automated through batch programs so it doesn't require manual work.
• We sometimes generate and send the data to Opower but they report they didn't get it. This requires manual intervention to send the same file again.

Incentivized