Talend enables energy company Uniper to analyse data at scale in the Cloud

Uniper, an international energy company, is using Talend to power its Uniper Data Analytics Platform. Talend integrates data coming from nearly 100 external and internal sources, including ETRMs, DWHs, IoT data coming from power station sensors and SAP enterprise data, into a Snowflake cloud-built data warehouse that enables a modern, central data lake on Microsoft Azure. This deployment helps business users access real-time industry, customer, and financial data to react better and faster to the market and improve energy trading.

Wednesday, 12th December 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The utility and power industry is in the midst of the biggest disruption in decades. According to the IEA, oil, gas, and coal represent about 80% of primary energy demand. However, current sector forecasts for energy demand from the IEA suggest that renewables and nuclear will grow the fastest between 2013 and 2040 (6.7% and 2.3% CAGR respectively). In response, forward-looking public and investor-owned utilities are leveraging cloud computing, automation, and multichannel communication to transform their back-office and operations systems. These technology-driven approaches are improving the way that utilities engage with residential, commercial, and industrial customers, moving beyond outage maps and online bills to provide operations updates, energy/resource efficiency programs, and tailored rate structures.

“By enabling us to integrate, centralize, and standardize our most valuable data, Talend gives us a single point of truth for decision support,” said René Greiner, Vice President for Data Integration, Uniper SE. “Employees in selected departments now have the support of data self-services to make the right decisions faster while ensuring high data quality and governance.”

Uniper was facing the challenge of expanding its market position while attempting to gain agility and improve efficiency. In 2017, the idea of an organization-wide data strategy emerged where selected business functions, including energy trading, risk management, sales and finance should be able to quickly and easily access market and customer data as well as internal key figures and financial data. To create its Data Analytics Platform, Uniper selected Tableau along with Talend to integrate data into a Snowflake modern, central data lake in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. This action helped reduce integration costs by 80%, while ensuring data governance. In addition, Uniper uses Talend Data Catalog including end to end metadata management capabilities, which intelligently indexes all data sources in the company to make them accessible in a self-service process. Through the Uniper Data Analytics Platform, business users are now able to improve trading in energy markets and offer electricity and gas in the right quantities at the right time.

“We’re thrilled to help Uniper bring all their external and internal data into a modern, central data lake in the cloud,” Snowflake’s General Vice President EMEA, Thibaut Ceyrolle said. “With data from a variety of sources in one place, Uniper can benefit from rapid analytics and derive data-driven insights.”

Compliance was also a major driver of Uniper’s digital transformation. Documenting and reporting trading transactions is a regulatory challenge for all energy companies; Uniper must report to European regulators every day on all the positions they have taken and all the deals they have transacted. The Data Analytics Platform helps Uniper better manage trade surveillance, including fraud detection, through easy access to accurate data and better data governance. Also, because of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Uniper ensures the security and traceability of its sensitive data. With Talend, the company can tag data as sensitive and GDPR-relevant, and make sure the provided data is accurate.

“Uniper has begun a complete digital transformation that is enabling them to better respond to the new needs and challenges of this rapidly changing industry where both competition and regulations are forcing companies to become data-driven,” said Ciaran Dynes, SVP of Products, Talend. “We are proud to support Uniper with their data journey in the cloud.”