Now Available: Storm Center Cloud

Posted July 30, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Outage Communications, Storm Center

We are pleased to announce the availability of Storm Center Cloud. This hosted version of Storm Center is a cloud-based solution that uses Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to reduce the infrastructure requirements typical of an “on premise” installation. Storm Center Cloud is also a managed solution, allowing for application updates to be performed by iFactor with minimal involvement from customer IT resources. Storm Center Cloud extends the previously released hosted version of Storm Center in that both the application server and web server are now based in the cloud.

Storm Center Cloud uses the advanced infrastructure of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing environment, including EC2 and S3, which guarantees 99.9% uptime and provides flexibility in scaling resources to meet the varying demands of site traffic typical of utility web sites during major weather events. With guaranteed availability and scalability, you can be sure that Storm Center will perform when your customers need it most. The AWS infrastructure is also highly secure – evidence of which can be seen through the many high profile companies that trust Amazon with their data.

Future plans for Storm Center Cloud include administrative controls for refresh schedule, custom layers, alerts, estimated restoration time (ETR) management, and general configuration parameters through a web-based interface. Also on the feature roadmap is support for an event-driven interface to support real time data display.

We have recently completed deployments for a large IOU and multiple cooperatives in the United States and will be blogging about those specific implementations in the coming weeks. Please contact sales@ifactorconsulting.com to find out how quickly we can bring Storm Center Cloud to your company’s website.

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Using Power Outages to Increase Customer Satisfaction

Posted July 27, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Mobile, Notifi, Outage Communications, Storm Center

In an article summarizing a recent J.D. Power and Associates report, MarketWatch.com noted that overall satisfaction of residential customers with their electric utility has increased from 2009 to 2010.  In addition to a decrease in customer-reported power outages, customers who do experience outages seem to be satisfied with their utility’s handling of outages.

Power outages create a unique circumstance for a utility: a situation that has the potential to incite much frustration among customers, yet also an opportunity to actually improve overall customer satisfaction.  Jeff Conklin of J.D. Power and Associates explains that although a “negative impact on satisfaction” can result from power outages, “utility providers who manage these incidents properly” may be able to increase their customer satisfaction.  How should utilities properly manage their power outages?  Part of the solution is “providing sufficiently detailed information about the outage” according to Conklin.

In today’s technologically-advanced society, most utility customers are accustomed to using their computers and phones to access information and news as well as communicate with both businesses and their social networks.  iFactor’s Storm Center and Notifi products allow utilities to communicate with their customers using web and mobile channels.  If customers are reaching for their phones and laptops to interact with their banks, schools, retailers, and other companies, why not provide them with outage information through the same avenue?

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Web Maps Connector Demonstration

Posted July 9, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Events, Web Maps Connector

Brad Sileo and Alfred Sawatzky will be hosting an online demonstration of our Web Maps Connector product on July 14th.   Below is a quick summary of topics to be discussed during the presentation.  For more information or to register, please contact admin@ifactorconsulting.com or visit our event site.

  • Access Bing Maps street and aerial views in Smallworld
  • Use worldwide address searching and reverse geocoding without maintaining any data
  • Integrate driving directions in any Smallworld application
  • Use crowd sourcing and local collaboration to save money through Open Street Maps
  • Setup Smallworld and PowerOn to show the weather in a matter of minutes

You can also visit the products section of our website for more information on the Web Maps Connector.

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New Web Maps Connector Reseller: Globema

Posted July 5, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Outage Communications, Web Maps Connector

iFactor Consulting has recently partnered with Globema, a GE Energy Authorized Partner and Smallworld VAR based in Poland, with subsidiaries in Czech Republic, Romania, and US.  Globema is now an authorized reseller of the Web Maps Connector product throughout all of Europe.  iFactor Consulting is joining the ranks of Globema’s vendor partner list, including GE Energy, Safe Software, and Oracle, among others.  A recognized Smallworld partner in Central and Eastern European countries, Globema can now add the Web Maps Connector to their extensive list of GIS-based products and services.

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Entergy includes Storm Center and Outage Texting in Hurricane Expo

Posted June 24, 2010 by Brad Sileo
Categories: Media Coverage, Notifi, Outage Communications, Storm Center
Tags: , ,

Entergy included several solutions powered by iFactor’s products at a recent Hurricane Expo. According to the press release:

This included an exhibit showing Entergy’s Storm Center website, including the View Outages feature. The exhibit will also feature Entergy’s Outage Texting service, which texts information to cell phones.

With storm season underway, and some forecasters predicting a busy one, its great to see utilities preparing in advance and working to keep their customer informed. At iFactor, we are certainly proud to provide solutions that help utilities communicate with their customers in all circumstances.

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Charts in Smallworld

Posted June 22, 2010 by ggarlick
Categories: Smallworld

Creating graphical charts in SW has been a standing challenge for developers – drawing classes have long been available in the core system but the amount of custom code necessary has discouraged development.   An alternative solution is to leverage freely available internet graphing tools.   iFactor’s Graham Garlick has written a ‘google_chart’ class that handles the data transfer between the SW session and the Google Charting Cloud and caches the generated chart so it can easily be rendered to any canvas within the session.

The ‘google_chart’ class is generic so all the current chart forms are supported.   Here are a few examples of charts driven by GIS network data:

Single charts display graphically any data available from the GIS session, whether it resides in a SW VMDS or some other connected database. The wrapper ‘chart’ class manages the periodic refreshing of individual charts to keep them up-to-date. Displaying multiple related charts together creates an instructive dashboard showing a near real time snapshot of the data. In addition, these charts could be pushed to the company web-site for general (internal or external) consumption.

It is expected that the future releases of the Google Chart API will support more complex chart forms such as 3D Bars and Lines, all of which will be available through the developed magik classes.

Contact sales@ifactorconsulting.com to learn more.

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Notifi’s Success at Entergy

Posted June 17, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Notifi, Outage Communications, Text Messaging

The popularity of Entergy’s  My Account Anywhere service has been growing steadily since its introduction in 2009.  Customer registration and text messaging continues to increase regularly, demonstrated in the graph below.  My Account Anywhere, powered by iFactor’s Notifi product, allows Entergy to communicate with their customers through two-way SMS text messaging.  Customers can subscribe to proactive outage alerts and also report outages via text message.

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Radar weather layer available in Storm Center and Web Maps Connector

Posted June 8, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Outage Communications

The iFactor team has recently been working on the creation of the new iFactor Radar Weather Layer for its standard products Storm Center and Web Maps Connector. Hosted in an Amazon S3 Server, the new layer is created as a new Bing Maps Tile layer, using the current weather provided by the NOAA National Weather Service Doppler RIDGE, and covering the entire continental United States. This is a new service provided by iFactor that will allow its existing and future clients to incorporate this fundamental data into their maps.  In the near future, iFactor will be developing the historic and loop animation for this new Weather Layer.

Weather in Storm Center

Weather in Web Maps Connector

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Version Viewer – inspect attribute and geometry differences between alternatives or checkpoints

Posted May 28, 2010 by ggarlick
Categories: Smallworld

Figuring out the data differences between two alternatives or checkpoints is not difficult but the analysis of the generated difference stream can be tiresome. iFactor’s Graham Garlick created the Version Viewer (VV) to make it easy to define the difference stream, inspect modified attributes, view changed geometries and generate a report of the differences. The difference report can be viewed within VV or written to a text file.

The GUI has tabs for selecting the alternatives/checkpoints of interest, viewing the calculated differences and reporting. Here is how the ‘View’ tab looks … click on the image to see more detail.

VV View Tab

In addition, geographic and field data of differenced objects can be selectively copied between alternatives. This advanced feature allows users to harvest data from any alternative/checkpoint into a target alternative.

Contact sales@ifactorconsulting.com to learn more.

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Storm Center Making News for Kenergy

Posted May 13, 2010 by ifactorjamie
Categories: Media Coverage, Outage Communications, Storm Center

Kenergy’s hosted Storm Center release is generating a positive response from the media and Kenergy customers.  A recent article at CourierPress.com highlights the benefits of the new release; see the full write-up here.  The article explains how Storm Center is used to display the location and severity of power outages as well as estimated restoration times.  The power of Storm Center in improving customer communications is emphasized, as the article points out that “the outage map should be helpful even for a home that is without power”.   This is reinforced by the fact that during the 2009 storms, website hits grew from “an average of 12,000 visits to the kenergycorp.com to 47,000 visits”.  The article also highlights Storm Center’s ability to satisfy Public Service Commission requirements for utilities to engage in more online interaction and communication.

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