Excelergy
Collaborative and Excelergy Set a New Utility Industry BenchmarkA Quick Look: Excelergy Corporation (www.excelergy.com), an e-technology leader for the deregulated energy industry, needed to develop a scalable solution for its billing, customer information, and trading partner management software.
The Challenge: Excelergy solutions were suitable for energy vendors with 30,000 clients. However, deregulation created opportunities to pursue larger, more established clients with customer bases greater than 2 million. Consequently, Excelergy faced the daunting task of ensuring that its Customer Information System could scale to support a massive increase in online enrollment requests and invoice generation. To accommodate its new requirements and support an enormous change to database dimensions, Excelergy needed to create and execute performance tests and develop data generation programs.
In short, Excelergy needed to develop a cost-effective solution to scale and manage millions of customer accounts, and it needed to do so quickly.
Excelergy Corporation quickly needed to develop a cost-effective solution to scale and successfully manage millions of customer accounts.
The Solution: A team of Collaborative and Excelergy professionals went to the IBM Netfinity Terplex lab in Raleigh-Durham, N.C. to conduct an industry benchmark of 10 million accounts. The team planned to demonstrate the ability of Excelergy’s product to process the OLTP and batch load generated by so many customers.
The test used 11 Netfinity Pentium four-way SMP processors, running in parallel with the Oracle 7.3.4 DBMS and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0. The hardware processed more than half a terabyte (500 billion bytes) of data—10 million customer accounts, containing a year’s history of information—in less than 10 hours.
The test featured several noteworthy attributes:
- All hardware and software used is commercially available.
- Customer accounts and customer data equates to 1.1 billion rows of data.
- Seven realistic electronic business transactions (EBTs), such as accessing and updating customer information, were run simultaneously.
- The online test supported 1,000 concurrent users with sub-second average response times. Moreover, Collaborative applied its proven methodologies and expertise to design, develop, and deploy the required solutions, quickly and reliably.
The Results: Thanks to the team’s efforts, Excelergy’s billing, customer information, and trading partner management software can easily support as many as 10 million utility customers. This huge figure represents a new utility industry standard; it exceeds—by far—any previously reported scalability tests for the deregulated energy market.
Excelergy’s software, running on IBM Netfinity (Intel Pentium-based server products), allows energy service and local distribution companies to accommodate their growing businesses by providing solutions that are scalable to millions of customers—online, and on a readily available server.
”The need to scale, successfully manage millions of customer accounts, and most importantly, to do so on such an affordable server, is very significant when meeting the challenges of energy deregulation. We viewed this scalability assessment as critical to our deployment of the system. These are impressive results for any industry."
- Gene Zimon, CIO Boston Gas, a subsidiary of Eastern Enterprises, and winner of the 1999 James H. McGraw Award for IT Excellence