Early Hadoop adopter Centrica British Gas starts to reap the benefits

Consolidating data infrastructure onto Hadoop gives opportunity to transform the business, says head of big data solutions Dee Mitra

Speaking at the Hadoop Summit 2015 in Brussels today, Dee Mitra, head of big data solutions at Centrica British Gas explained some of the ways in which the company is using Hadoop, including consolidating the data estate and crunching data from smart meters to help customer services sales teams and rationalise maintenance works.

What interested the firm initially, Mitra said, was the fact that Hadoop is open source, able to scale and that it offered significant cost savings opportunities in the long run.

Hadoop is a relatively new technology and even though British Gas has been using the big data platform for only 18 months it can be considered an early adopter, the very earliest adopters being web firms like Yahoo with very different business and technology models.

"Eighteen months ago most people thought that Hadoop was good for unstructured data but not for structured data," she said, explaining how her team's decision to adopt the platform was seen as a gamble in some quarters. "But we stuck to the path," she went on, although the path was rocky at times.

Earlier versions of Hadoop were immature, she said, meaning that her team had to do quite a bit of work adapting it to the company's needs.

"Some things were not up to the mark. We had to engineer some of our own solutions to get over the enterprise readiness problems," she said. However, Hadoop is evolving rapidly and the ecosystem is more coherent now.

"It gives me pleasure to see the pace of change going on, not only in Hadoop but in the whole ecosystem. It seems like everybody is really pulling together towards a common goal, and those problems that we had to engineer solutions to - they are gone now."

The energy supply industry is going through a transformation, with big data solutions and techniques allowing new ways of doing traditional tasks. Mitra explained that the 1.3 million smart meters that British Gas has installed mean that household consumption can be tracked in real-time, services can be tailored to individual households and maintenance activities can be adjusted to fit with usage patterns rather than a fixed schedule. These will be the fruits of the earlier work of consolidating the data silos across the company.

"We started off by consolidating our legacy estate of traditional data platforms and bringing them all into Hadoop," Mitra said. "Now we have all the data in one place, we are at the monetisation stage. We are exploiting the data we have spent the last 18 months collecting. We are using data not only for our customers' benefit but also for our own so we can sell better services to our customers and partners and optimise our engineering works," she said, explaining that as well as an energy supplier Centrica is also an insurance and engineering services provider, giving opportunities for cross-selling.

The early issues surrounding enterprise readiness - usually taken to mean security, authentication and governance - have been ironed out now, she reiterated, and there should be little in the way of any company wishing to adopt Hadoop.

"From a wider adoption perspective, now is the time to adopt," Mitra concluded.