First Utility is the largest independent energy supplier in the UK, serving over 1 million households. When Bill Wilkins became CIO/CTO in 2010, he faced challenges of scaling IT as the business grew rapidly. He focused on developing First Utility's own technology solutions like the My Energy platform, which helps customers reduce energy usage and save money. This focus on in-house innovation and a cloud-based infrastructure allows First Utility to disrupt the traditional energy market through agility and lower costs compared to competitors.
3. w w w. f i r s t - u t i l i t y. c o m 5
When Bill Wilkins took on
the joint roles of CIO
and CTO at First Utility
back in 2010, he was faced with
two challenges: making the IT fit
for purpose and also capable of
scaling up as the business grew. The
pilot platform First Utility originally
deployed wasn’t performing as
required, Wilkins explains, and he
was asked to advise on the correct
route to take. “The platform wasn’t
scaling and the company was
looking at re-engineering it, so I
presented the founders with a plan
and was asked to implement it. And
it’s been a very exciting few years
watching a concept with a small
number of customers growing to
the very large business is today with
close to a million customers and
£1billion in revenue,” Wilkins adds.
First Utility was started by a
group of smart investors back
in 2008, looking to replicate the
success they had already achieved
in the telco industry, building an
independent company and offering
customers a different proposition.
Initially, the company was all about
smart meters and accurate billing
– relatively new concepts at the
time – and it is still, primarily, a
technology company, although
the product it sells is energy.
As CIO and CTO, Wilkins says,
he has two distinct roles. The CTO
part of his role is about designing
digital solutions around First Utility’s
core energy proposition, and his
IneightshortyearsFirstUtilityhasgone
fromahandfulofcustomerstocompeting
withtheBigSixenergyprovidersinthe
UK.BusinessReviewEuropediscovers
howtechnologyhasmadethis possible
4 5
4. Simple.
Smart.
Agile.
LiveOps Cloud is building a happier world, one
customer experience at a time. The world’s
most passionate, customer-focused brands
empower their workforces, delight customers
and improve the bottom line – all with LiveOps
Cloud’s always-on, highly secure, true multi-
tenant and instantly scalable contact centre-
as-a-service (CCaaS) platform.
Try it for free! - www.liveopscloud.com/trial
EUROPE OFFICE
Davidson House | The Forbury Reading
RG1 3EU | UNITED KINGDOM
Phone: 020 3006 8280 | Fax: 020 3008 6171
www.liveopscloud.com
CIO role is all about making sure
that technology was never a barrier
to what the company wanted to
do from a business perspective.
“When you go from nothing to a
million households and from 30
employees to 1,400 employees,
the scalability of the platform is a
very important factor in how quickly
you can grow. So the CIO part of
my role is all about delivering that
robust, secure, scale, fit-for-purpose
business. The CTO part of my role is
about positively evolving the way our
customers engage with their energy
consumption and also with us. So
that it’s more convenient for them,
they get a better service experience
and ultimately they end up staying
longer with us,” Wilkins adds.
Research and development
And a pivotal part of this technology
delivery is First Utility’s preference
for investing in developing its
own solutions. It has a Business
Technology Group – carefully
named by Wilkins to highlight that
technology is at the core of the
company and not just an internal
service provider – that works
collaboratively with and as peers of
the other departments. “We have
203 technologists that work in the
Business Technology Group so
we invest quite heavily in building
our own solutions rather than
buying shrink-wrapped products
from the marketplace.”
This focus on developing solutions
in-house is partly the result of
necessity, Wilkins says, as eight
years ago there wasn’t much out
there already for the relatively
new independent energy sector.
“There aren’t many specialist
software vendors that deal with how
Number of employees
at First Utility
1400
7
5. Company Background
First Utility is the largest
independent energy supplier in the
UK, servicing more than one million
households. The company is focused
on disrupting the legacy, slow-
changing utilities industry through
innovative new applications that
deliver total transparency and help
customers understand and manage
their energy consumption. First Utility
has a number of “firsts” to its name: it
was the first supplier to offer dual-fuel
Smart Metering to UK households,
the first to offer an consumer energy
analytics platform and the first to offer
fully automated video meter reads in
its mobile app.
Business Objectives – Drive
Better Customer Experience
Before adopting the DataStax
Enterprise (DSE) distributed database
platform, First Utility sought to
achieve two main goals – develop
a modern platform to support a
disruptive energy startup through
innovation and evolve a highly efficient
business model that allows us to offer
consistently market leading prices to
our customers – DSE supports both
of these strategies.
First Utility drives innovation
through applications such as “My
Energy”, a core component of the
company’s digital proposition that
helps customers optimize energy
consumption and lower their bills.
Many households now use the
Smart Metering service on a monthly
and even weekly basis, and First
Utility seeks to bring more of these
value-added applications to its
customers via DataStax Enterprise.
Each smart meter produces up to
17 thousands meter readings per
year. Most households have two
meters – gas and electricity – and
First Utility supplies nearly one million
homes. That’s a lot of data to store
and process within the My Energy
platform and doing it in an affordable
way is why they chose DSE.
“Investing in digital engagements
creates higher customer lifetime
value, and First Utility is focused on
delivering applications that build
trust and create long-term profitable
relationships with our customers,”
said Bill Wilkins, CIO/CTO, First Utility.
“DataStax Enterprise offers the data
scale and analytics capabilities we
need to bring these new innovations
to market.”
DataStax Enterprise – Database
for Cloud Applications
First Utility realized it needed
a new platform that could store
and manipulate large amounts of
data for their My Energy and other
applications, so the company
adopted DataStax Enterprise. DSE
is a distributed database platform
based on the open source Apache
CassandraTM database. DSE’s
masterless architecture ensures very
high availability and linear scalability to
support the uptime and performance
requirements of cloud applications.
First Utility was initially drawn
to using open source Apache
CassandraTM, but realized that DSE’s
integrated Analytics capabilities
based on Apache Spark provided
functionality not readily available
elsewhere. The company also quickly
realized that DataStax could help
them adopt a “digital shift” mindset
and adopt the skills needed to create
next-generation applications.
When first undertaking their
digital transformation, First Utility
considered utilizing prepackaged
software solutions that did not
address their broader data
management ecosystem. However
for the long run, the company wanted
its own framework for creating new
applications and pursued a database
platform that could accomplish
innovative application delivery.
Results – Drive Customer
Retention
Since rolling out the data platform
with DataStax Enterprise, First Utility
has grown its footprint in DSE. It
started as a strategy to support a
modern innovative new platform.
However success there has spawned
the desire to bring the benefits to
more traditional areas of Energy I.T.
and have deployed the framework
in the Customer Care and Billing
platform – a mission-critical, business
facing system. With DSE, First Utility
was the first company to offer an
energy data analytics platform that
shows how much energy customers
are using and spending to help them
optimize their usage.
First Utility can now see that
customers who use the platform
regularly use 5-6% less energy and
save, on an average, £45 a year
based on an annual spend of £900.
Customers are also happier, and stay
with them 60% longer than before.
First Utility Helps Customers Optimize Their Energy
Consumption Using DataStax Enterprise
you support retail energy in the UK
– because we couldn’t afford to go
to SAP and buy their solution when
we were a young company – so we
had to hire a lot of smart software
engineers and do a lot of that primary
platform development ourselves.”
In-house innovation
Keeping the software engineering
team engaged has been key to
enabling the flow of innovation, by
providing regular research days
and encouraging contribution
to open source communities. A
good example is the successful
research and development project
that resulted in natural language
processing techniques that works
out what a customer is asking for in
an intelligent way. Wilkins adds: “It
handles a good proportion of our
inbound customer contact traffic
now via mail but also in our mobile
platform, so customers can chat to
what they think is an agent but it is
an artificial intelligence brain and
it’s available 24/7 helping fix a direct
debit, find out what the last bill was
or even submit a meter reading.”
It was important to Wilkins that
Ask First, as this product is called,
wasn’t seen by customers as a
barrier to good service or as a
deflection technique. He adds:
“We wanted Ask First to actually
answer the question, not just give
back some standard request. So
when we build a product, there is
instrumentation inside the product to
make sure we know who is using it
and what questions they’re asking.
8
6. We also track customers through
our digital platform and through
our voice platform so we know if
they subsequently call back in.
This way we know that people
that use Ask First have a very high
percentage of satisfaction.”
Identifying differentiators
When choosing whether to invest
in its own solutions or to work
with what the market has to offer,
the deciding factor for Wilkins is
whether First Utility can differentiate
in some way. It has its own modern
technology platform that uses very
few third party technology players
and therefore has a very low cost
of ownership associated with it, but
there are solutions that First Utility
looks to external partners for. Wilkins
adds: “Typically, if it’s a generic
requirement and we can access it at
a decent price and we think the price
scales reasonably with our business
model then we will buy. We don’t
want to build for the sake of building.”
Building something bespoke
together with carefully selected
partners is also an option, and is
what Wilkins decided to do with the
customer billing platform when its
own system was no longer able to
cope with the company’s growth.
“We scanned the market and we
found a multi-product billing platform
in Israel from a company called
LogNet Systems. We had fewer
than 50,000 customers at the time
and LogNet was willing to work
with us at our relatively small scale
and treat us like a very important
customer. So we then embarked on
a three-year project to jointly develop
a UK energy billing system - the
system we’re on today - and one
that we’re very confident will get us
way up into the Big Six territories.”
“Weinvestquite
heavily inbuilding
ourownsolutions
ratherthan
buying shrink-
wrapped products
fromthemarketplace”
1 1
7. The Big Six he is referring to, of
course, are the major players in
the UK’s energy market including
British Gas and EDF. So what
does Wilkins think sets First Utility
apart from these giants? From a
business perspective, he says, it
is the technology platform. “The
economics of our technology
platform is far superior because
it’s more modern and with that
comes cost advantage. Also, it
follows that it is much more agile,
much more nimble. Agile technical
platforms enable agile businesses.”
My Energy
The customer-facing My Energy
platform, which was introduced
in 2014, is another critical
differentiator. It enables customers
to understand their energy use
in a way that can actually lead to
savings. Wilkins says: “It shows you
things like how you’re consuming
energy versus people in your
neighbourhood. Whether you’re
more efficient or less efficient. It
shows you how you might want
to save energy through energy-
saving calculators. It customises
hints and tips for you. It shows
you how your bill will change over
the next six months based on
your individual tariffs and individual
consumption levels.”
It provides our customers tailored
information that typically leads to a
five percent reduction in energy use
of those who sign up for it. Great
for the customer and the planet –
but also great for First Utility, as
it is a popular tool. “It’s very clear
from our analytics that the more
time people spend on our digital
platforms, the longer they stay with
us and the happier they are with our
service. Many companies would
look at investing in something like
My Energy, which is completely
outside of the required for what
you need to operate in the energy
space, as a luxury, maybe not an
appropriate use of investment.
Actually, it’s turned out to be as
we believed it would be: a very
good business investment.”
In 2015, video meter reading
1 2
8. capability was added, which means
a customer can simply hold the
camera to the meter to submit a
reading through the mobile app.
“Although we led the introduction
of residential smart meters, we
are pragmatic and realise that
not every UK household will
have one soon,” adds Wilkins.
Another important area of focus
for First Utility is optimising its
business model. Wilkins explains:
“Technology plays a lead role
here, as you would expect. A less
conventional approach is to risk
using emerging technologies to
reduce the footprint of expensive
commercial software. An example
here is the use of Cassandra and
DataStaxx to upgrade our meter
data management store – improving
our scalability, performance whilst
slashing our vendor costs.”
First Utility also makes use of a
cloud-based voice platform from
LiveOps by Unify Communications.
“Not owning a large data centre
allows us to focus on our business
and allow other professional
organisations use their economies
of scale to improve our efficiency.
We have gone beyond using
services like Amazon and Google
for compute power and storage
and use cloud-platforms for one
of our most critical applications –
supporting the voice channel for
our customer contact centre.”
Collaborative working
Wilkins also made the decision
to put Google Apps inside First
Utility, firstly because as CIO, he
didn’t want to manage the email
infrastructure. He explains: “In the
same way I don’t want to manage
the data centre or air conditioning
or power supplies, as those things
don’t differentiate us and there are
experts out there already. Amazon
is a great example: it knows more
about how to do efficient data
centre management than I ever
will. And Google knows more
about email and delivering
a web-scale infrastructure for
collaboration.”
And Wilkins has witnessed a real
transformation thanks to Google
Apps, with staff working together,
real-time on shared documents,
making use of Google Hangouts
and even creating live broadcasts
– Hangouts on Air – to run “town-
halls” that update the business
community on new innovations in
data. It has also freed the company
from what Wilkins calls ‘attachment
hell’, which is an added bonus.
The issue of scale comes up
once again when the subject turns
to the future of First Utility which,
Wilkins says, includes the continual
optimisation of its business model.
“We have quite a large percentage
of our resources analysing the data
that comes out of our contact centre
and our business process to see
where the squeaky wheels are and
see how we can automate better. To
make us a more efficient machine.”
The Business Technology Group
will continue to focus on product
development, particularly around
mobile and My Energy, looking at
what it can offer to First Utility’s
growing number of customers.
w w w. f i r s t - u t i l i t y. c o m 1 5
9. Point 3, Opus 40 Business Park
Haywood Road, Warwick, CV34 5AH
01926 320 700
www.first-utility.com
