Gary Miles (Gentrack)
NZX-listed software provider Gentrack has partnered with Salesforce and AWS to launch g2.0, its next generation platform for utilities.
The company also revealed more details of its work with power company Mercury to streamline its systems and provide new product bundles following Mercury's acquisition of Trustpower’s retail business earlier this year.
Utilities were operating in real volatility, Gentrack CEO Gary Miles said, and g2.0 offered a viable alternative to the legacy end-to-end CRM and billing systems that dominated the global market.
"These legacy systems are supported by too many Excel spreadsheets, manual processes and embedded running costs," he said. "The water and energy verticals face an existential need to transform as worldwide we tackle the sustainability challenge of a generation.”
Globally, utilities were facing rising wholesale prices, political pressures, sustainability targets, regulatory change and demands for better customer experience.
While these could work to diminish profitability, there were also opportunities to deliver innovative new services, better digital engagement and develop new revenue streams.
Leading utilities were spearheading this change, Miles said. Gentrack's g2.0 would accelerate the industry’s pace of change and allow utilities to "transform with confidence".
Gentrack's g2.0 combined the company's 30 years of industry experience with Salesforce’s CRM to offer extensive capabilities, a rich ecosystem, and out of the box "customer journeys" integrated with Gentrack's core platform, he said.
Running with composable architecture on AWS ensured high performance, security, and scalability, while enabling rapid prototyping and innovation with minimal system change.
In addition to Salesforce's CRM and AWS, g20 delivered data driven decision making and analytics based on cloud analytics company Snowflake and Salesforce's Einstein platform. Einstein allows Salesforce users to understand, aggregate, and visualise data coming from different locations, such as Salesforce, ERP systems, data warehouses and log files and to receive insights and query data on any device.
Meanwhile, Gentrack was helping Mercury migrate its customers onto the Gentrack billing system used by Trustpower to support the delivery of premium offers, bundles and unique solutions to customers.
In May 2022, Mercury acquired Trustpower’s retail business, creating what it described as New Zealand’s leading multi-product utilities retail business.
Gentrack was working to minimise the complexity of the migration while maintaining the reliability and performance of Gentrack’s "meter-to-cash" solution.
The project included the deployment of meter data services on AWS to enable half-hour time of use billing with immediate cross-selling opportunities through innovative bundled product offers.
“We partnered with Gentrack because of their successful track record supporting service flexibility and bundling for multi play," Mercury chief executive Vince Hawksworth said.
In May, Gentrack reported half year revenue of $57.1 million, up 12 per cent on the same period of 2021. However, EBITDA of $1.2 million was down by $5.8 million as Gentrack increased R&D investment.
"Our programmes for product investment and business development are positioning us well for the accelerating industry transformation," the company told shareholders. "Early signs of increased engagement with clients across the world are encouraging."
