2 Getting Started with Data Transfer
Oracle Utilities Opower provides data-driven software, outbound communications, and personalized insights to help utility customers understand and manage their energy use. To implement and support these products for utilities, Oracle Utilities Opower works with each utility to identify and collect the data necessary to run the program and provide a positive and meaningful customer experience. Examples of the types of data needed for transfer include:
- Account data: This helps identify a customer’s service agreement, contact details, rate plan, and related account information.
- Billing and interval usage data: This helps to track customer energy usage and cost, and to deliver personalized insights to customers through reports, communications, and web applications about how customers can save energy.
- Premise data: This helps identify the customer’s service location and can support experiences such as residential or commercial and industrial data in various interactive web dashboards, charts, and graphs.
- Rates data: This helps provide customers with personalized cost insights, cost graphs, and rate plan comparisons.
- Entity attribute data: This helps create customer-tailored communications, recommendations, and user experiences based on customer characteristics and program participation.
Providing complete and accurate data allows Oracle Utilities Opower to deliver richer customer experiences. More complete data can support more personalized insights, more accurate recommendations, and better explanations of energy use and cost. More limited data can restrict which products, features, and insights are available to utility customers.
Providing Your Data to Oracle Utilities
Oracle Utilities understands that utilities must protect customer and operational data carefully. For that reason, Oracle Utilities works with each utility to confirm which data is required for the implementation, how the data will be transferred, and how the data will be validated before production use.
At a high level, the most common types of data required include customer information system (CIS) data and interval meter data. The required data fields will vary based on the products and solutions included in the program. Your Oracle Utilities Opower Delivery Team will work with you to identify the exact data requirements, as well as the best option for transferring that data to Oracle Utilities.
Choosing a Data Ingress Option
There are several data ingress options available to you. These methods are intended to reduce the amount of work required by utilities, while giving Oracle Utilities Opower more consistent access to the source data needed for validation and transformation.
The best data transfer method depends on the products being deployed, the utility’s source systems and hosting model, latency expectations, and the data ingress options available for the utility environment. Your Delivery Team will work with you to choose the option that best meets your needs and requirements.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GoldenGate. This option is recommended for utilities that already have Oracle Utilities Customer Information System (CIS) environments, such as Customer Cloud Service, Customer Care and Billing, or Customer to Meter. GoldenGate can replicate data from the utility CIS database into an Oracle-controlled target so Opower can validate and transform the data for product use.
Delta Sharing. This option is recommended for utilities that use a non-Oracle Utilities cloud or data platform, such as Databricks or other similar cloud data lakes, and can publish agreed data sets through a Delta Sharing-compatible service. This path is cloud-agnostic but requires joint security, connectivity, and latency testing.
API-based ingress. This option is recommended only when the utility already has stable APIs that expose the required data and strongly prefers that Oracle Utilities pull from those APIs. This path is more customized than replication or sharing options and usually requires additional design and testing.
SFTP flat files. This legacy option should be used only when modern ingress methods are not feasible. SFTP requires the utility to build and maintain file extracts in the expected format, which can increase implementation effort, ongoing maintenance, and data latency.
Common Data Ingress Onboarding Activities
For any data ingress option, Oracle Utilities and the utility should do the following types of activities:
- Confirm the product scope, source systems, required data, and expected update frequency
- Identify the data sources and agree how initial historical data and ongoing updates will be provided
- Complete security and connectivity setup, exchange sample data, validate data quality, and establish monitoring and support contacts for production operations
The selected option must support consistent access to the agreed data, including the ability to identify new, changed, and deleted records where applicable. Utilities should also be prepared to provide technical contacts, source-system documentation, security approvals, test data, and production-readiness support.