Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

1. ROCKING THE WORLD OF
BIG DATA AT CENTRICA
Reuben Banga
Big Data Infrastructure & Operations Manager

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BIG DATA – TIME FOR CHANGE?
“Change has a considerable impact on the human mind
To the fearful it is threatening because it means things may get worse
To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better
To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better”
- Whitney Young
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

3. 3
LIVING IN A NEW AGE?
 The Millennial Generation
• Highly educated
• Self-confident
• Technologically savvy
• Ambitious
• Connected
 Acceleration in Societal change
• Social Media
• Smartphones
• Mobile Computing
• New Technology
 Instant gratification – Netflix, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Spotify
 Hard to please – spoilt for choice
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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CENTRICA – ABOUT US
“We are an energy and services company. Everything we do is focused on
satisfying the changing needs of our customers”
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

5. 5 Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica
CENTRICA – KEY FIGURES
 Multinational Utility Company
 FTSE 100 Company
 £28 Billion Revenue
 £1.5 Billion Operating Profit
 28 Million Customer Accounts
 38,000 Employees Worldwide

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CENTRICA – OUR BRANDS
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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CENTRICA - BRITISH GAS
 UK’s leading energy and home services provider
 More than 11 million homes and businesses choose British Gas and depend on us to meet
their energy needs
 National network of trusted British Gas engineers
 Developed innovations – Hive App - Honeycomb IoT Platform
 Smart metering to all our customers by 2020
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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SMART METERING
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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BRITISH GAS – INFORMATION SYSTEMS
 Provides application development, design, physical infrastructure and architecture for
entire organization
 Impacts Centrica at every level
 Our innovations make our customers lives simpler
 Led Big Data (Hadoop) innovation in British Gas
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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BACKGROUND – WHY DO THIS?
“You have to think of how the traditional SQL-based answers can’t really cope with joining
the structured and unstructured data together for a unified view of your customers. In this
new paradigm of IoT [Internet of Things] and devices you need to go beyond that.”
- Daljit Rehal, Strategic Systems Director
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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BACKGROUND – WHY DO THIS?
 Creation of a single view of a customer
 High costs for development and infrastructure in upgrading existing platforms to host
more data and alleviate bottlenecks
 Data loading issues from source into underlying data analytics, MI and reporting platforms
 Turnaround time and cost for delivering new data to the business was high
 System landscape was complicated and could not sustainably integrate and exploit new
and growing data volumes
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

12. 12 Slide 12
BACKGROUND – COMPLICATED ESTATE?

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IN THE BEGINNING…
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica
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IT DOESN’T GET MUCH SEXIER THAN THIS….DOES IT?
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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WHY HORTONWORKS?
 100% Open Source commitment
 Relationship / Partnership
 Strong alliances with our strategic partners, such as SAP / HP
 Open, Honest, Flexible Culture
 Value
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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HADOOP (HDP) IT’S A MATURE TECHNOLOGY
 Operational BAU for 18 months +
 Large user community
 Variety of use cases
 Successful platform migrations & upgrades
 Vendor relationships progressed/partnerships
 HDF – use cases
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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How well did we do?
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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TYPICAL BILL – BEFORE
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SMART ENERGY REPORT – AFTER
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ENGINEERS VIEW BEFORE
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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ENGINEERS VIEW NOW
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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ENGINEERS VIEW NOW
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica
Engineers can see what complaints
have gone before them to drive
excellent and focussed service
And engineers can now generate immediate leads based on
discussions with the customers

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DASHBOARDS – BROKEN PROMISE
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DASHBOARD – SMART METER INSTALL
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EXAMPLE CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS
 MI all in one place. Will help ensure our customers have an amazing
experience when they call BGSM – Central Hub Expert
 Has given us the capability to profile & visualise over 1 years’ worth of
Half Hourly energy usage from the UK view right down to individual
meter points - Senior Commercial Manager (Analytics)
 This report has delivered a view of our smart appointment channels that
we simply didn’t have before. We can see each day & each hour how we
are performing and adjust our strategy accordingly. - Customer
Experience Manager
 Removed 3 databases, 5 reports and delivered a single view of the truth
for BGSM field KPI’s – simplifying our MI estate for maintenance and for
our customer – Smart MI business partner
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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AWARD WINNING
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HOW DO WE DO BIG DATA?
 Agile
 Continuous Integration
 Continuous Testing
 Continuous Delivery
 DevOps
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DEVOPS – WHAT IS IT?
 It’s a Methodology?
 It’s a Culture?
 It’s a Movement?
 It’s a Practice?
 It’s a Salary Bracket?
 It’s like true love, you’ll just know?
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DEVOPS – THE EQUATION
DevOps = Time Efficiency
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FUTURE
 Success breeds success
 Collaboration across our brands
 Cloud
 Physical Data Centre's
 Stretch & Offload
 Manage cost
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THE SECRET TO OUR SUCCESS
The data strategy was driven from C-Level with strong leadership
and vision from the Strategic Director.
Big Data is not only a technological revolution it’s an organization
and cultural challenge.
To ensure success you need to challenge the status-quo and inspire
people to do things better
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica

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BIG DATA – ARE YOU READY FOR THE CHALLENGE?
“Change has a considerable impact on the human mind
To the fearful it is threatening because it means things may get worse
To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better
To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better”
- Whitney Young
Rocking the World of Big Data at Centrica