Case Study: Opower achieves $320M in consumer utility bill savings with Cloudera

Opower Uses Big Data to Help Consumers Save $320 Million in Utility Bills

Opower is a SaaS company that uses behavioral science and big-data analytics to help utility customers reduce energy use and save money. As smart meters, sensors and other sources ramped up time-series and customer data, Opower’s initial relational databases could not scale to ingest, store and analyze the volume and velocity of information utilities produce—limiting their ability to deliver timely, personalized energy insights.

Opower moved to an enterprise data hub built on Cloudera (Hadoop, HBase and Hive) to batch, analyze and serve large-scale time-series data in parallel and in near real time. The scalable platform powers personalized dashboards, alerts and communications to 85+ utilities and 18+ million homes, enabling behavior changes that have delivered about 2.7 TWh of savings and more than US$320 million in consumer utility bill reductions.

Opower

Eric Chang

Technical Lead for Data Services