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Jan 17, 2017GE, one of the most-respected companies in the world and an icon of the industrial sector, is re-inventing itself as a digital innovator. GE’s goals are ambitious, to say the least. Based on GE’s unprecedented Predix IoT software, Current is a new venture energy company driving innovation and efficiency across the full portfolio of energy solutions. Current’s aim is to deliver “Energy as a Service.” In less than twelve months, Current has ramped up to an estimated $1 billion in revenue, and is working with customers across a wide spectrum of industries, from big box retailers to manufacturers to municipalities to better understand and proactively manage their energy consumption.
Navigating Complex and Evolving Constraints
Current, like many other digital initiatives, faced the challenge of gathering requirements for a monetization solution before the end-state was fully characterized. Rather than attempting to write the definitive requirements document, the team planned for agility and assumed that requirements would be constantly changing. A microservices-based architecture and solutions that could be re-configured without a lot of time or expense were foundational characteristics in developing the overall platform.
Accelerating Time-to-Market
Current also made a conscious decision to leverage domain expertise wherever it could be found – internally or externally, across a spectrum of functional capabilities and emphasize time-to-market as a primary decision driver. One such need was to support highly granular rating and billing of power usage while also providing insights into the economics of power consumption. Thus, GE evaluated 3rd-party platforms for their sophisticated billing requirements.
Selecting a Billing Provider
In a condensed time period, the Current team evaluated a number of rating and billing solutions. Current recognized that it needed a provider with deep rating and billing expertise and a partner that could think creatively about solving the rapidly evolving future needs. Implicitly, the rating and billing partner vendor needed to bring to the project a flexible architectural approach. The selected provider also needed to prove their ability to balance immediate needs with requirement for future agility including the criteria below:
- Cloud-first approach
- Scalability
- Multi-layered approach to security
- A high degree of flexibility, granularity and agility
- Ability to handle extremely high transactional volumes and rating complexities
Gotransverse Fits the Bill for GE
Gotransverse was selected as the usage and rating platform to power Current’s Energy Management System—identifying energy bill errors, predicting expenses and prescribing future savings actions through “what-if” analysis and side-by-side comparison for energy providers.
Nelson stated, “The robustness of the chosen platform, TRACT by Gotransverse, was beyond what we could have built in the timeframes we are looking to launch,” says PJ Nelson, product manager for Current. “It goes beyond charges by tariffs, but into future business models we want to support, such as the virtualized power plants. This is the power of partnering with Gotransverse, pun intended.”
Read the entire case study written by MGI Research on how Current, powered by GE, is transforming its business with Gotransverse’s TRACT platform here.
PJ Nelson, Product Manager for Current talks about choosing Gotransverse as its intelligent billing and agile monetization solution for EMS: