Itron, which offers products and services on energy and water resource management, is consolidating its software solutions globally into a single platform built on Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
Azure will be the backbone for Itron Total Outcomes, which offers business outcomes for solving utility and smart city challenges in an Outcomes as a Service model to reduce costs and boost performance.
With this new integration, Itron plans to introduce a new range of services for its products including solar integration, leak detection and analytics.
The company says that by combining data from different utilities can give rise to new intelligence and insights and it is particularly useful for utilities and cities.
Integrating solar-related products could give rise to insights about real-time data about power consumption, usage patterns, panel temperature and generated power.
This could be combined with weather and geolocation data to get insights about energy efficiency and asset health.
Gas-utilities will also benefit from this integration, as leak detection through cloud-based applications and services keeping track of pressure, temperature and pipeline stress can enhance safety and reduce resource wastage.
Similar benefits can also be reaped from integrating water utilities.
Itron DevOps vice president Greg Richards said: “Itron is standardizing on Microsoft Azure to provide higher quality and more seamless services to our customers. It allows us to offer the functionality of many software offerings in a unified ‘as a service’ environment.
“Offering our software applications via Microsoft Azure will enable Itron to be more agile in innovation and development for our customers.”
Itron’s Total Outcomes, including Outcomes as a Service and Software as Service (SaaS) will be supported by Microsoft Azure, surrounded by value-adding services including Cortana Intelligence Suite and Azure IoT Suite capabilities.
Microsoft Cloud Platform corporate vice president Julia White said: “Azure is uniquely positioned to empower utilities and cities to accelerate their digital transformation, with the power of our global-scale, hybrid and trusted cloud.
“Through Azure, Itron can enable a new range of IoT services that deliver valuable insights and drive faster decision making.”