Issues Facing 21st Century Network-Centric Businesses
Network-centric businesses, such as utilities and cable & broadband operators, share a number of unique challenges, including regulation, an aging workforce, stringent compliance requirements, increasing financial and competitive pressures, and assets spread over a large geographic service region. Effectively managing these issues requires a solid understanding of enterprise-wide business operations. But most organizations are hampered by a fragmented IT infrastructure comprised of separate data silos dispersed throughout various departments. Inconsistent and inaccurate information about the network and customers along with difficulty integrating information complicates decision making. The result? Lost revenue opportunities and increased operational expenses and capital expenditures.
Current approaches to addressing the issue include:
- Attempting to integrate operations point products with horizontal industry integration solutions
- Implementing generic business intelligence solutions
- Custom system integration projects
Unfortunately, most of these approaches do not enable organizations to tap into location-, time-, and connectivity-related network attributes. And the custom approaches ultimately end up exacerbating the issue of an already unwieldy IT infrastructure, while providing only partial insight into business operations.
What is needed is a data integration and data management platform plus industry-specific solutions specifically designed with the needs of network-centric businesses in mind that make order out of data chaos so employees throughout an organization gain operational business insight. To solve the problem, this business insight must be enabled by easy access to consistent and accurate operations data (including location, time, and network connectivity) plus business context (including customer and financial information as appropriate).
CertaLogic provides the platform and solutions that allow utilities, cable & broadband operators, and other network-centric businesses to better manage their complex operations, both now and in the future.
Industries Served and Customers
CertaLogic offers a unique, market-leading product line that delivers operational business insight to network-centric businesses. The company’s solutions are currently deployed and in use by more than 40 North and South American utility and cable & broadband companies ranging in size from five thousand to three million consumers.
CertaLogic is proud to have a 100% implementation success rate and a 100% retention rate and has seen its customers achieve significant return on investment through:
- Increased operating efficiency
- Improved asset utilization
- Enhanced revenue
- Improved regulatory outcomes
History
CertaLogic’s roots trace back to the early 1990’s when privatization and regulatory reform were just getting underway in Argentina. The regulatory framework that resulted created information requirements for the newly privatized utilities that required new operations data integration and data management capabilities. The solution set that CertaLogic’s founders developed in response to this need is a data integration and data management platform and a comprehensive set of applications with innovative, superior capabilities for network-centric businesses. It is these roots that spawned a different kind of utility and cable & broadband operations data integration and data management capability and thereby enabled a more richly featured set of applications.
Compliance with the new regulations required utilities to precisely assess: the impact of outages down to the customer level, the cause of the outage, the effectiveness of actions taken to restore service, and actions taken to prevent similar outages in the future. Heavy penalties were applied based (1) on the extent and duration of excess outages and (2) on reporting bad information to the regulators. Specifically, the first set of penalties was calculated as a multiple of the value of the quantity of energy not consumed during excess outages. The calculation of the appropriate penalties required the assembly of recent historical data from a number of utility departmental systems in the precise context of the network event and network and customer impacts associated with each specific outage, something well beyond the automation capabilities of commercially available utility IT systems at the time (this remains generally true today). In addition, the calculations and the results of the penalty determination had to be available for audit by the regulatory authority, hence the second set of penalties for reporting bad information to the regulator.
Solving the industry’s business problem required a new kind of IT solution. As a result, the CertaLogic product line was designed from the outset with a clean-sheet-of-paper approach to address the specific business (not merely departmental technical) needs of network-centric businesses. The result was a unique product with the following capabilities:
- An intelligent network model
- Explicit knowledge of network events over both time and space to enable rapid analysis, reporting, and audit
- Easy access to precise, accurate cross-department operations and business data
- The usual utility applications – Geographic Information System (GIS), Asset Management, Outage Management (OMS), etc. – able to generate and use the precise data.
The product family that has resulted from this set of requirements not only produces the information necessary for complying with the local regulatory requirements, which are being adopted by a growing number of emerging market regulators, but also results in an operations data integration and data management solution that is capable of uniquely enabling a broad range of high value business functions to be performed routinely by network-based businesses in order to reduce costs, improve asset utilization, increase revenue, improve regulatory outcomes, and generally improve overall operating effectiveness.
Certa Platform and Solution Suites
Built from the ground up to address the unique issues of network-centric businesses, the powerful Certa Platform establishes a unified live model of a company’s operating network. While other approaches – typically built atop generic data integration and business intelligence tools – bypass meaningful operational and location-based data, CertaLogic’s Certa Platform brings together the location, time, and connectivity of all network assets and events with critical business context, such as customer status and financial information.
Unlike other attempts to provide insight into network operations, the Certa Platform was designed from the outset with the needs of network-centric businesses in mind and leverages a unique patent-pending data integration and data management engine that has evolved through four generations of highly disciplined software development. The result? Network-centric businesses can:
- Achieve a high level of network and network-related business information quality
- Sustain and improve information accuracy and consistency over time
- Gain an integrated view of the business by providing information in precise operational and business context when and where it is needed
- Leverage the value of existing applications and IT infrastructure
- …And, in general, significantly improve core corporate effectiveness by providing on-the-fly actionable information for day-to-day operating decisions, planning, investment (capital expenditure), and regulatory needs
Robust add-on
solution suites designed to address asset management, operations optimization, engineering, service reliability, and marketing challenges help CertaLogic’s Utility and Cable & Broadband customers excel in their industries.
Management Team
CertaLogic benefits from an experienced and talented team dedicated to addressing network-centric business issues. With a comprehensive mix of technology visionaries and seasoned executives, CertaLogic has developed innovative solutions that enable network-centric businesses to achieve operational excellence. In addition, the vision, experience, and collective leadership of CertaLogic’s Board of Directors are paving the way to make CertaLogic the global leader in operational business insight solutions for network-centric businesses. CertaLogic offers the technology and long-term vision to help network-centric businesses meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.
