It is no secret that electric utilities are having to undergo a deep transformation to adapt to the energy transition. The extent of this transformation calls to mind what happened to telephone companies when the Internet came along. And as with the Internet’s impact on telephony, one of the key factors in the electrical utility incumbents’ ability to adapt to change is their capacity for digitalisation.
Reuters Events’ latest report, produced in collaboration with Infor, explores the value in the cloud for utility companies navigating the energy transition. Get a free copy today, by following the link here.
Like today’s leading diversified telecommunications giants, far-sighted utilities now realise their future lies in developing digital platforms that can help reduce costs and speed the development of new customer offerings. The big difference between telecommunications and energy providers is that while the former helped shape today’s digital world, the latter has by some measures arrived late to digitalisation. This difference in timing has pros and cons for the utility industry.
On the plus side, it has given the digital arena time to evolve, meaning that there are now many established and reliable tools available for digitalisation. That said, the digital threat landscape is also more highly evolved. As such, today’s energy sector digitalisation programmes need to be much more security-aware than might have been the case for similar initiatives a decade or two ago.
Take Saas and cloud computing, for example: in November 2019, before COVID-19 stalled many development projects, 71% of utilities were said to be using cloud-based software. And this had increased from 45% just three years previously. Elsewhere, the utility sector was said to be preparing to spend more than $4bn on public cloud solutions.
Partly, though, these numbers could be explained by the fact that more and more enterprise applications, from Microsoft’s Office suite to customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce.com, are being delivered through the cloud. When it comes to enterprise software that focuses on the day to day field operations of any utility, it is still perhaps early to talk of mass migration to the cloud.
Reuters Events’ latest report, produced in collaboration with Infor, explores the value in the cloud for utility companies navigating the energy transition. Get a free copy today, by following the link here.