IBM is collaborating with Avertra, a Virginia-based integration services, products and consultancy organisation, to accelerate digital transformation in the energy and utilities industry.

Avertra will host its MiCustomer Digital Experience platform on IBM Cloud, helping to build connected utilities that can run more intelligently and securely.

Avertra is leveraging IBM’s Cloud Engagement Fund, established as part of IBM’s $1bn investment into its ecosystem, to access technical resources and cloud credits to support migration of client workloads to hybrid cloud environments, including IBM Cloud.

Using offerings from IBM Cloud, including the IBM Kubernetes Service (IKS), Avertra can gain more value from its data to help speed the development of tools designed to improve efficiency for the industry.

A prime example is MiCustomer, an integrated application suite that Averta clients can use on the IBM Cloud to manage all aspects of customer engagement, from the initial meter reading to final bill payment. This process includes invoicing, correspondence, automated back office exception resolution and analytics, all based on a unified platform designed to streamline operations to help reduce internal costs for energy and utility companies.

The offering is also designed to give control to consumers, allowing them to keep tabs on their energy usage, predict future usage and have oversight into their overall utility spend, along with other real-time features that support a simpler and more personalised customer experience.

“We view this collaboration as a natural extension of our expanding work with IBM,” said Bashir Bseirani, CEO of Avertra. “To date, we’ve had great success using IBM Watson, and now with IBM Cloud we’ll be able to improve the scalability of our secured digital solutions to help build more connected energy and utilities organisations supported by IBM’s services. Our mission is to simplify life, and we view our IBM collaboration as a way to simplify how we manage our critical digital assets. We look forward to the next stage in our journey with IBM.”

Avertra is part of IBM’s hybrid cloud ecosystem, an initiative to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to help clients manage and modernise workloads for any cloud environment, including the IBM public cloud. With its security, enterprise-grade capabilities and support for open-source technologies, the IBM public cloud is designed to differentiate and extend on hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprise workloads.

“We are seeing the energy and utilities industry accelerating its cloud adoption, particularly to improve communication, function and accessibility to meet the demands of increasingly digitally-native consumers,” said Evaristus Mainsah, general manager at IBM. “Through IBM’s cloud engagement fund, we’re making it easier for ecosystem partners like Avertra to build secured, integrated cloud solutions by migrating their workloads to an open hybrid cloud environment like IBM Cloud, bringing the value of multi-cloud applications to their energy and utilities clients.”

From increasing demand for innovation in renewable energy to giving consumers more on-demand insight into their energy usage, utility providers can turn to a hybrid cloud to help address the needs of a more sustainability-focused, digital society.