Pacific Gas and Electric Company Relies on Oracle to Power Nation's Largest Smart...

Pacific Gas and Electric Company Relies on Oracle to Power Nation's Largest
Smart Meter Initiative

TAMPA, Fla., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- DISTRIBUTECH -- Oracle
today announced that Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is using
Oracle(R) Utilities Customer Care and Billing on an Oracle enterprise grid to
power the largest smart meter initiative in the United States to date, helping
businesses and households become more energy-efficient and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020718/ORCLLOGO)
PG&E serves approximately 15 million people in Northern and Central
California. Each day, the company prints and mails more than 260,000 bills
and processes about $40 million in payments. It receives about 15 million
calls each year. Launched this year, the PG&E SmartMeter(TM) initiative will
allow the utility to replace monthly, in-person meter reads with automatic
reads to improve customer service, restore power more quickly during outages
and help reduce peak electricity demand. During the next five years, PG&E
will upgrade more than 10 million customer meters to enable frequent meter
reads (daily for gas, hourly or 15-minute intervals for electric). The volume
of meter reads will grow from four million to 120 million meter reads per
month for gas and from five million to 3.6 billion meter reads per month for
electric.
The company will rely on Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to
maintain and manage both the meter inventory and customer information --
converting the raw data into billable usage and generating bills based on each
customer's selected rate option/program. The application will allow PG&E to
provide its SmartMeter(TM) customers with detailed usage information they can
use both to better understand and manage their bills, and to participate in
future energy efficiency and demand-response programs.
More than 2,300 PG&E employees already use Oracle Utilities Customer Care
and Billing to manage billing, payments, credit/collections and meter
inventory, as well as to support operational systems including field-work
dispatch and outage management.
New Grid Infrastructure Supports Growing Data Volume and SmartMeter(TM)
Program
To support its new systems and increasing customer demands, PG&E required
an IT infrastructure that could meet stringent performance and availability
requirements, and scale to meet SmartMeter(TM) rollout plans in a
cost-efficient manner. In addition to upgrading more than 10 million meters
with SmartMeter(TM) technology, the company's 20-terabyte database is expected
to grow to 45 terabytes as the SmartMeter(TM) program rolls out to the
millions of PG&E customers.
To address these challenges, PG&E recently transitioned from a mainframe
environment (IBM DB2 running on OS/390) to an enterprise grid using Oracle
Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on UNIX servers.
The UNIX servers run on IBM System p570s in an eight-node Oracle RAC cluster,
dramatically increasing computational capacity over the previous mainframe
system while also reducing environmental data center costs by 50 percent.
PG&E expects to save $5 million each year with the new system.
With its enterprise grid, PG&E has deployed a single database across a
cluster of servers, improving system performance and availability. PG&E can
easily add capacity on demand to incrementally scale out server and storage
capacity in a cost-efficient manner. PG&E also uses several Oracle Database
features such as Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Recovery Manager
and Oracle Flashback to simplify database administration and enhance backup
and recovery capabilities.
The migration from a mainframe to an Oracle enterprise grid is allowing
PG&E to reduce infrastructure costs and support the SmartMeter(TM) initiative
by providing the ability to incrementally scale the database to support
growing data volumes and users within each workload area and aligning
appropriate computing resources within the grid to meet business requirements.
The new system will also allow PG&E to reduce downtime from scheduled outages,
minimize reliance on backup tapes for first-tier recovery and improve resource
utilization across the board.
"We are pleased to support PG&E as it continues to provide innovative
services to its customers," said Quentin Grady, senior vice president and
general manager, Oracle Utilities. "Oracle Utilities Customer Care and
Billing running on an enterprise grid with Oracle Database and Oracle Real
Application Clusters provides reliability, performance and scalability as PG&E
rolls out its SmartMeter(TM) initiative."
About Oracle Utilities
Oracle Utilities delivers the proven software applications that help
utilities achieve competitive advantage, business performance excellence and a
lower total cost of technology ownership. Oracle Utilities integrates
industry-specific customer care and billing, network management, work and
asset management, mobile workforce management and meter data management
applications with the capabilities of Oracle's industry-leading enterprise
applications, business intelligence tools, middleware and database
technologies. Oracle Utilities enables its customers to adapt more nimbly to
market deregulation, meet ever-evolving customer demands, and deliver on
commitments to environmental conservation. For more information, visit
http://www.oracle.com/industries/utilities.
About Oracle
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company.
For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at
http://www.oracle.com.
Trademarks
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
SOURCE Oracle

Caroline Yu of Oracle, +1-650-506-8920, caroline.yu@oracle.com; or Janice
Hazen of O'Keeffe & Company, +1-770-938-4753, jhazen@okco.com, for Oracle