capability was added , which means a customer can simply hold the camera to the meter to submit a reading through the mobile app . “ Although we led the introduction of residential smart meters , we are pragmatic and realise that not every UK household will have one soon ,” adds Wilkins .
Another important area of focus for First Utility is optimising its business model . Wilkins explains : “ Technology plays a lead role here , as you would expect . A less conventional approach is to risk using emerging technologies to reduce the footprint of expensive commercial software . An example here is the use of Cassandra and DataStaxx to upgrade our meter data management store – improving our scalability , performance whilst slashing our vendor costs .” First Utility also makes use of a cloud-based voice platform from LiveOps by Unify Communications . “ Not owning a large data centre allows us to focus on our business and allow other professional organisations use their economies