Origin Utility is a software and solutions company that focuses on helping municipalities, cities and utility companies transition enterprise applications to the cloud with their Origin SmartCity platform. This solution provides a robust, flexible and integrated application suite offering to enable utility companies, cities, counties and municipalities to exceed their current financial, customer engagement, and service-related requirements, while also laying a foundation for continuous innovation. SmartCity is a single vendor offering that allows municipalities to bring high-quality, feature-rich, Tier 1 utility meter-to-cash (M2C) applications to its communities that meet the right balance of cost and functionality.
I sat down with Madhur Jain. Vice President of Products at Origin, and discussed the advantages of using Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI as the core for its SmartCity solution platform.
WebLogic Server for OCI Environment
Madhur Jain emphasized the use of WebLogic servers to power the SmartCity platform, which serves multiple multi-tenanted environments for its clients across small to mid-sized cities in the US and Canada. “We needed a cloud-based solution stack offering that supported the core of our technology and application infrastructure,” says Jain. “We use a variety of applications, including Oracle’s Customer to Meter (C2M) utility billing and customer information system, Origin Customer Experience (OriginCX) web-portal for customer engagement, OriginPay for municipal-specific payment processing, MobileLite for service order and field work management, and Jaspersoft for reporting and data analytics. All of these applications are seamlessly integrated into the middleware layer of our flexible Enterprise Service Framework and accessed with a single login via SSO, with 24 x 7 global support from the Origin SmartOps technical and operational support team. WebLogic is the core technology that makes the entire stack work. Right now, we’re in a transition phase with only 4 projects moving to the cloud where we have 19 clusters, 7 domains and 19 JVMs, with 7 environments and expect to ramp up usage quickly as we on-board new clients and switch them from AWS and/or On-prem to OCI.”
“WebLogic servers power our SmartCity platform, which serves multiple multi-tenanted environments for our clients across small to mid-sized cities in the US and Canada. We needed a solution stack within our cloud-based offering that supports the core of our technology and application infrastructure.”
Madhur Jain Vice President of Product, Origin Utility
Results
Using Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI provides high performance, availability and rich management tooling for efficient and low-cost operations. “These applications enable Origin clients, utilities and cities to manage their customer’s profiles, notifications, meters, consumption, rates, billing, payments – essentially all parts of their customer data and interaction, along with managing their field work, assets, crews, shifts, appointments, devices, items, meter reads, and all associated interfaces with 3rd party applications,” says Jain. “The key users of these applications are both internal and external, including Origin’s technical and functional designers/developers and client users, such as CSRs, billing reps, back office, cashiers, meter shop, meter readers, field crews, etc. They can access all applications through their browser and mobile devices. These applications are strategic and mission-critical to their business, as they are responsible for billing a big portion of the US/Canada population for their utility usage, collecting payments, and managing a major revenue stream for a lot of mid to small-sized cities. Some of our most used applications include Customer to Meter, Customer Care and Billing, Mobile Workforce Management, Meter Data Management, OriginCX, OriginPay and Origin MobileLite.”
Mr. Jain was very enthusiastic and satistified with their decision to move to WebLogic Server for OCI. Early cost analysis by Origin Utility found that using WebLogic was more cost-effective on OCI compared to AWS or other cloud platforms in terms of licensing, usage rates and support. This combined with their past experience working with Weblogic for over 15 years made it an easy transition.
Additionally, Origin Utility was able to shift their resources on delivering business value and to the growth of the company. “It has helped us reduce our operations cost significantly, fast track our onboarding, and freed up our infrastructure team to focus on more critical and innovative tasks. I would advise other companies to adopt WebLogic in OCI to improve overall effectiveness of their infrastructure while reducing costs and increase robustness and scalability of their application solutions. It’s absolutely a win win,” says Jain.
The WebLogic Product Management team is currently working with Origin Utility on potential Kubernetes containers implementation for WLS. “We’ve been working with the WebLogic PM team on a Proof of Concept and a roadmap,” says Jain. “The fact that we can lift and shift our WebLogic instances from On-prem to the cloud with no code changes and reduce our deployment time from days to hours while adding robustness and scalability is a huge driver towards making that change.”
About Origin Utility
Origin Utility, is a software and solutions company that focuses on helping municipalities, cities and utility companies with their unique challenges. Origin helps customers with their SmartCity enterprise service framework and SmartCity platform, which provide tier 1 software applications, support and on-going service for municipal utility billing and back-office operations.