iFactor Consulting will be attending this year’s CONNECT Expo in Kansas City, Missouri. Come visit us in booth 109, and don’t forget to look for us in this month’s issue of RE Magazine!
The release of Storm Center at E.On showed up on the news through several media outlets including this video. Let’s hope we don’t see maps looking like these examples anytime soon! It is great to know the E.On solution is powered by the cloud and is ready to handle that volume of data should the need arise.
There were about 20 TV spots and 3 radio spots promoting the release around E.On’s service territory, reaching a Nielson audience of 822,000 people.
E.ON has updated their website with new power outage maps built on iFactor’s Storm Center™ product. The new website provides details about outages to E.ON customers, the media, emergency responders, and public officials on both blue sky and storm days. The solution was designed as part of the overall response to the 2009 ice storms in Kentucky and has been tested to handle the extreme loads the E.ON website would face in a similar event in the future. This includes supporting up to 2500 concurrent users on the page accessing information on outages which could affect several hundred thousand customers.
Users of the website can access detailed information on each outage being worked, included estimated restoration times, outage causes, customers affected, and the boundary of the incident. The system also provides summary data by ZIP code and county in both map and tabular formats. E.ON’s solution includes support for updating the website with global alert messages and easy administration of the site using the Storm Center Administration Console.
The new website is available to the public at http://stormcenter.eon-us.com/default.html.
Local and national media outlets offered several reports on the new solution, helping E.ON get the word out to their customers about investments they have made to improve customer service and communications.
KATV 7, the local ABC affiliate in Little Rock, Arkansas, ran a television story featuring the functionality of Storm Center recently deployed by Entergy. The report highlights the information the site delivers to customers, including the use of innovative distribution network layers to show very detailed information on power outages. the full report is available at:
The recent release of iFactor Consulting’s Storm Center on entergy.com, including the display of a red/green distribution network overlay, was featured in an article describing the benefits this solution will bring to Entergy’s customers. The new version of this site, deployed as part of improving customer service for regular operations and major events, includes a display of the distribution lines using red and green coloring to indicate the current power status.
According to James Thompson, Entergy Arkansas senior communications specialist, “This detailed view of power availability is rare among power companies”. He continues saying “Instead of showing a general area where power may be out, this new view shows customers exactly whether power is available on a given street.”
The solution uses iFactor’s Smallworld Virtual Earth Connector, as well as the inherent support for complex layer data in iFactor’s Storm Center product.
The full article can be seen at: http://arkansasmatters.com/content/fulltext/?cid=172741
The implementation of Storm Center for outage communications at Entergy can be found at http://www.entergy.com/storm_center/outages.aspx.
