Frost Radar™: Digital Platforms for Electric Utility and Energy Retail Customer Care and Engagement, 2021

The energy industry is among the world’s most dynamic and in need of change. Power distribution companies and power retailers are a fundamental piece of the energy transition as they enable further demand in electrification, decentralized renewable energy integration, and greenhouse gas reductions while helping customers become more energy efficient and adopt new technologies to reduce energy consumption. Customer engagement, customer information, and billing systems are at the core of the retail and power distribution business and have a preponderant role as these players transform into clean energy service providers. A series of market shifts are disrupting the industry and calling for substantial changes in the functionalities and characteristics of software solutions to make them more efficient and scalable and allow for fast innovation. Driven by electricity market deregulation, a wider number of options started to appear targeting the energy retail segment and incorporate new features aiming at developing end-to-end offerings. The boundaries between traditional systems started to blur, transforming into integrated solution platforms delivered under software-as-a-service business models. The demand for more modular, real-time, and easy-to-scale solutions with lower costs and faster implementation times is driving market participants toward the use of integrated, cloud-native services using microservice architectures. The Frost Radar™ reveals the market positioning of companies in an industry using their Growth and Innovation scores as highlighted in the Frost Radar™ methodology. The document presents competitive profiles on each of the companies in the Frost Radar™ based on their strengths, opportunities, and a small discussion on their positioning. Frost & Sullivan analyzes hundreds of companies in an industry and benchmarks them across 10 criteria on the Frost Radar™, where the leading companies in the industry are then positioned. Author: Maria Benintende