Just four weeks ago, powercloud was onsite at the CS Week Conference in Phoenix, AZ. In the aftermath of Covid, everyone seemed to enjoy being out in a business atmosphere together. From networking with attendees to building partner relationships and learning about new trends in the utility space, it was a very positive and successful event.
Here are a few of my key takeaways from CS Week:
- Attendance was noticeably up from last year’s event. You could definitely tell that people were looking forward to leaving their homes and offices and being back in action. At the powercloud booth, we felt that there was great traffic in the exhibit hall and attendees were wanting to engage.
- Our new partner NET2GRID demonstrated residential energy insights and predictions by collecting and analyzing smart meter data of all granularities.
- Digital adoption continues to accelerate across the customer relationship, and this is driven mainly by customer expectations. Digital transformation, while not a new concept, is still in early adoption stages at many utilities. The growing demand for digital by customers along with more availability of mature digital platforms will drive utilities to move faster on their digital transformation projects.
- Prepay will be the next disruptive wave for U.S. Utilities. Salt River Project (SRP), one of the primary public utilities in Arizona, did a session on this topic. Some utilities have already adopted prepay but for the majority, this is a growing customer need and will be a trend to watch in the near future.
powercloud announced two new partnerships during CS Week: ACI and GridX.
- Bringing together GridX’s powerful rate design, rate analytics, and complex billing capabilities with powercloud’s CIS and backend capabilities is a potent combination. Many Utilities are looking for another alternative for CIS billing, and GridX believes we provide unique capabilities that will make it a game changer for those that are looking to enhance/replace their back office while supporting the complete utility product lifecycle. It’s an exciting story!
- For the ACI partnership, people really loved the idea of embedding a powerful payment engine with powercloud to offer new payment methods to customers like you and me. New payment methods are evolving rapidly with new options like biometric face recognition and cryptocurrency. Through our partnership with ACI, we were the first at CS Week to say that we can use a cryptocurrency to pay a utility invoice – another exciting story that the attendees were excited to hear about.
On the subject of partners, powercloud hosted several of our partners in the powercloud booth. Attendees could visit many of the companies that are part of the powercloud ecosystem, all in one booth. Thank you to all the participants including ACI Worldwide, NET2GRID, work digital GmbH, CONUTI, Advizzo, GridX, and KloudGin.
Many Utilities who came to our booth were looking for a new CIS/Billing solution to replace their 10–20-year-old legacy systems. They liked the fact that you can pick and choose from our AppStore with the pre-integrated Apps that we have built into powercloud. This makes it easy to integrate to any application or using pre-existing applications from the customer as long as powercloud remains the CIS/Billing foundation at the core.
A huge thanks to everyone who came by our booth to plant a tree. Rather than giving attendees a t-shirt or other tchotchke, powercloud elected to help attendees help the planet by planting a tree in honor of each attendee that stopped by our booth. We are happy to say that we were able to donate over 100 trees as a result of the show.
Last but not least, thank you to the entire CS Week team for making this year’s conference a major success. #CSWeek2022
We can’t wait to see you all next year.
