Cayenta

Cayenta supplies enterprise software built specifically for utilities, covering customer management, billing, financials, work management and human capital management. The positioning is narrow by design, since these are the systems a utility runs its operations on and the vendor sells only into that sector.

Specialisation is the whole argument in this category. Utility billing is not general purpose invoicing: it deals with metered consumption, tiered and seasonal rate structures, regulated tariffs, estimated reads, budget billing and arrangements for customers in arrears, all under rules set by a regulator rather than by the utility. A general enterprise resource planning system has to be bent a long way to accommodate that, and the bending is where implementations fail.

Combining customer information with financials and work management in one suite reflects how a utility actually operates, because a service order in the field, the customer account it belongs to and the general ledger entry it produces are one event. Keeping them in one system removes the reconciliation that otherwise runs between them.

The vendor emphasises long term partnership with the communities its customers serve, which reflects the reality of this market: a customer information system replacement is a multi year programme and the relationship outlasts most of the staff involved in choosing it.