Case Study: Centrica achieves a data-driven transformation and smarter customer experience with Cloudera

Centrica Reducing Costs and Data Accuracy with Smart Metering

Centrica, a FTSE 50 energy and services group serving roughly 28 million customer accounts with £28bn in revenues and 39,000 employees, set out to put customers at the centre of the business by improving data accuracy, reducing costs and rethinking how engineers interact with customers. The company needed a modern, consolidated data platform to support smart metering, better billing, and more personalised, efficient field services.

Centrica built a data lake—starting from a Raspberry Pi/Hadoop proof of concept and scaling to a 250‑node Hortonworks-powered cluster with up to 4 PB usable storage—decommissioned legacy warehouses and deployed HDP/HDF to drive analytics. The platform enabled apps like the Customer Information App, supported 2.9M smart meters, improved billing and operational accuracy, reduced complaints, unlocked new data-driven products and workflows, and set the organisation on a path to further cloud-enabled cost efficiencies.

Centrica