Sydney, Australia --- (METERING.COM) --- March 12, 2013 - Yarra Valley Water has implemented an Oracle Engineered Systems infrastructure to provide a standardized IT architecture aimed at helping the utility to improve business systems performance, achieve a better ROI and enhance customer service.
Owned by the Victorian state government, Yarra Valley Water is the largest of Melbourne’s three water retail businesses. It provides water supply and sewerage services to over 1.7 million people and over 50,000 businesses in Melbourne’s northern and eastern suburbs, including some recycled water and trade waste customers.
The company is using Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the Exadata Database Machine to consolidate its core systems and run the Oracle software. This includes Utilities Customer Care & Billing, which helps the company manage 700,000 customer accounts, as well as Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, WebCenter and WebCenter Content for its website and intranet portal.
Significant performance gains have been achieved. The deployment of the Exalogic platform for Yarra Valley Water’s billing and customer management application has helped with reduced application response times from up to nine seconds to sub-seconds.
In the data center, as a result of the use of Exadata, regular overnight re-indexing of the data warehouse, which previously took 8 hours, now takes around one hour; and a complete re-indexing/re-build, which covers six applications, now takes around 3.5 hours instead of 24 hours.
“Exalogic was attractive to us because it allowed us to focus more on the business applications than the technology and infrastructure, and reduced the need for us to be in the hardware game,” commented Leigh Berrell, CIO of Yarra Valley Water. “We are very happy with the results, and will further develop our private cloud strategy around the Oracle platform.”
Yarra Valley Water went live with Exalogic and Exadata in May 2012, coinciding with an upgrade of the Utilities Customer Care & Billing and Business Intelligence systems. Other elements of the company’s private cloud platform include Oracle Identity Management, WebLogic Suite and built-in virtualisation with VM.
Also planned to go live in the first half of 2013 is a portal for use by land developers and consultants, from which they can make online requests for authorization to proceed with land developments on parcels of land or to request that Yarra Valley Water provision infrastructure and services to those properties.