In the utility industry, operational costs remain a hot topic for discussion and concern. Traditionally, regulators have required utilities to use capital expenditures for fixed assets in calculating ROI and rate cases—which made accounting for cloud-based solutions problematic.
Looking at this through a financial lens, though, using a business-integrated SaaS solution (like VertexOne), operations become far less costly than any other solution in the utility marketplace. And utilities are able to capitalize far more of the implementation costs than before.
Traditionally, regulators have allowed for a larger rate of return on capital investments. In other words, utilities’ rate cases could only be based on purchase of fixed assets. That meant utilities avoided investments in cloud capabilities, because they tend to have greater operational rather than capital expense. This, in turn, keeps them from enjoying all of the robust benefits that cloud solutions have to offer.
VertexOne was purpose-built to address this issue. It allows utilities to capitalize more on the solution because they own the licenses to the software, as well as the data and the configuration. This ownership means the utility can move their solution to their own data center if they choose, but more importantly they can capitalize more implementation costs and recognize them as part of the rate of return with regulators.
A good example of this is VertexOne’s partnership with DC Water. We recently took them live on a large-scale CIS implementation project that included mobile workforce management and multi-channel functionalities and disciplines. Our solution empowered DC Water to realize a $27 million ROI on its CIS, where this previously would have been a sunk cost. From a business perspective, this is a prime demonstration of how VertexOne as a business-integrated SaaS can significantly drive up ROI while driving down operational expenses for our utility customers.
Watch our video to better understand how our VertexOne solutions help utilities address the issues around capitalizing implementation costs for a utility’s cloud-based initiatives.
