Oracle today unveiled Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter, a comprehensive meter-to-cash solution for today's customer-first utility. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter is the first offering to combine a market-leading customer information system (CIS) with a market-leading meter data management system (MDMS) into one solution with a single user interface.

Leveraging a single shared technology stack, this new solution can reduce utility costs due to faster implementation times, fewer integration points, and greater operational efficiencies. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter delivers all of the benefits of a complete meter solution and a powerful customer platform, enabling utilities to more immediately and efficiently extract value from advanced metering infrastructure data to improve customer experience. With this streamlined approach, utilities can more easily design customer-centric, personalized programs and services, and prepare for the continued growth of smart meter programs. This holistic solution lays the groundwork for an evolving utility that wants to roll out smart meters in the future, without a major IT project.

"Utilities that leverage data to deliver an improved customer experience and more personalized programs - such as tailored time-of-use billing, or targeted home energy management advice - and do this with a single, integrated solution that combines customer and meter data, will be well poised to take advantage of the continued growth of smart meters and a smarter, more customer-centric grid", according to Roberta Bigliani, Vice President, IDC Energy Insights.

With rising customer expectations and expanding smart grids, utilities are turning to modern, comprehensive technologies that deliver world-class customer engagement and operational efficiencies. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter provides the platform to respond to evolving market dynamics and quickly implement new business requirements that span metering, rate analysis, billing, collections and customer programs. For example, as electric utilities face increasing distributed generation they may test new rate structures to better manage demand. With Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter, months of customization can be reduced to hours of configuration and utilities can easily test and implement the changes necessary to evolve. Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter consolidates advanced usage and billing capabilities for all meters – from scalar to interval – so utilities can manage those meters and their data in one place and derive greater value from grid investments.

"Oracle Utilities continues to partner with utilities around the globe to solve the issue of increasing complexity in this rapidly transforming industry. Simplifying meter-to-cash processes is an important part of those partnerships. This new solution does exactly that: it allows utilities to get up and running in a matter of months with a complete meter-to-cash solution and allows them to leverage that complete solution to streamline business processes and easily stay ahead of rapidly evolving business drivers impacting how they serve their customers," said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities.