eMeter Implements Hybrid Cloud Solution for Massive Gains in Global Agility, Cutting Deployment Time from Weeks to Hours
Company Size
200-1,000
Region
- America
- Asia
Country
- India
- United States
Product
- EnergyIP
- VMware vCloud Director Enterprise
- Bluelock Virtual Datacenters
- Bluelock Portfolio
Tech Stack
- Oracle
- Linux
- Microsoft Windows
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
eMeter, a Siemens Business, specializes in software solutions for electric, gas, and water utilities. The company’s flagship product is EnergyIP, a platform for managing, integrating and optimizing smart grid and smart meter technologies. Founded in 1999, eMeter employs more than 200 people and operates worldwide, with an especially robust presence in the United States (U.S.) and India. The company works with a number of installation partners—including world-class vendors like Siemens, Accenture, IBM, Logica and SAP—to implement software solutions at utility companies around the world. In an effort to help partners deliver the best service possible, eMeter offers intensive “boot camp” training on how to properly install and manage its metering solutions.
The Challenge
eMeter, a global business, works with a number of installation partners to implement software solutions at utility companies around the world. They offer intensive “boot camp” training on how to properly install and manage its metering solutions. These boot camps are very system-intensive and require a lot of short-term resources to get an installation underway. After those first few weeks, their bandwidth requirements drop considerably. In the past, this meant buying enough hardware to absorb the impact of a heavy workload, with the full knowledge that the workload would soon change. A lot of their hardware was underused. The complicating factor for them is that it’s very difficult to buy a piece of equipment in India. Taxes and regulations are complicated. Some technologies aren’t available in every area of the country. As a result, it can take months to procure just one piece of hardware. To expand further into India—and to grow its footprint elsewhere—eMeter needed a more flexible solution for deploying compute resources on demand.
The Solution
Bond and his team looked at a number of options for creating a more flexible environment—everything from the public cloud to physical hosting services. The only model that made sense for them was the hybrid cloud. When Bond arrived at eMeter in 2010, the company had already used VMware solutions to virtualize approximately 60 percent of its workload in-house, but the IT organization’s approach to virtualization was ad hoc rather than unified. Now Bond and his team wanted to determine if VMware had the right technology for a more focused and proactive migration toward cloud computing. To help guide their decision, they turned to VMware vCloud Datacenter service provider Bluelock. eMeter engaged with Bluelock for a proof of concept that demonstrated nearly instant results. Within a matter of months, eMeter had upgraded to VMware vCloud Director Enterprise, with the goal of continuing to virtualize as much of their environment as possible while also moving relevant workloads to Bluelock Virtual Datacenters.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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