Utility Customer Engagement Platform Leverages Big Data to Drive Large Scale Energy Efficiency and Increase Customer Satisfaction

ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 19, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Opower, the leading customer engagement solutions provider for the utility industry, today announced the release of Opower 4, a customer engagement platform that uses behavioral science and big data analytics to promote consumer participation in a variety of utility programs that support energy efficiency, smart grid and new rate adoption and customer satisfaction. Opower 4 is the most significant product release for the company in more than a year.

"In order to address a number of strategic challenges, including rising supply costs and smart grid acceptance, utilities need to revolutionize their customer-facing infrastructure and deepen their relationship with their customers," said Opower President and Founder Alex Laskey. "The Opower platform is the only proven solution for the utility industry that drives greater customer collaboration and engagement, while meeting other important business objectives such as increasing energy efficiency."

"National Grid is committed to helping our customers take control of their energy consumption through a variety of energy efficiency programs and partners," said Marcy Reed, president, National Grid, MA. "Since we started working with Opower two years ago, we have continually expanded our partnership to bring new features and services to our customers that will help further reduce their energy use while realizing significant dollar savings. The Opower platform is a proven tool that does just that."

Opower manages energy data from over 50 million households across 75 utility deployments and then analyses that data, and combines it with other third party sources -- including weather data, county assessor data, and other pieces of information -- to provide homeowners with efficiency tips and insights. In June, Opower announced that it had partnered with Cloudera's Hadoop software and support.

"Cloudera is uniquely able to empower data-driven enterprises like Opower to ask bigger questions of their large and complex data sets, dramatically improving the economics and performance of Big Data management," said Charles Zedlewski, Vice President of Product at Cloudera. "We're proud that the global leader in utility customer engagement chose Cloudera as their platform for Big Data to help drive the bottom line."

About Opower 4

Opower 4 is the only global enterprise-class customer engagement platform designed specifically for the utility industry. The Opower 4 SaaS platform is powered by a patent-pending behavior and energy analytics engine that continues to be refined as more than 15 million energy consumers interact with it at least on monthly basis. An annual R &D investment of more than $25M ensures that the Opower platform is on the leading edge of customer engagement capabilities as well as data privacy, security, compliance and big data analytics standards.

Opower 4 is organized into four proven, mutually reinforcing areas of customer interaction: Behavioral Engagement, Energy Information Services, Retail & Marketing Services, and Home Control. To date, the Opower platform has delivered 1.6 TWhs in verified energy savings to utility partners seeking to achieve cost-effective energy efficiency goals and has recorded up to 100% lifts in customer participation in utility-marketed programs.

The new platform includes:

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Opower Introduces Opower 4