Software-as-a-Service: A Novelty for Water Utilities

Many proponents of SaaS argue that it is a powerful paradigm for data analytics and for enterprises, especially those with complex processes and large data sets, such as utilities. This is true in theory, but we wanted to test this in practice. Most utilities are not past users of any cloud based services or of software provided under a SaaS business model. In fact, when selling the TaKaDu solution, we encounter utilities who have never considered using a SaaS product before. Spain’s Udal Sareak from Bilbao is one of them.

We recently had a brief phone interview with Mr. Koldo Urkullu, General Manager of Udal Sareak, the Bilbao Water Consortium responsible for managing the water distribution network of 60 municipalities and localities in the Bilbao area.

On Analytics and Operational Excellence

The frontier for using data to make decisions has changed dramatically. It is not only real time. The more interesting point is that it also represents a complex network without requiring a model of the network – it just shows us how the network behaves, and makes analytics and decision making much simpler, with no need for complex services and software to set-up. Google analytics is also a great example in that it is web-based, and does data collection simply and easily (just insert the HTML tag) – a pre-cursor to SaaS based analytics.
Good analytics also means business success. In a Sloan Management Review with IBM, 53% percent of top performers use analytics to guide day-to-day operations in contrast to just 27% of laggards.