VertexOne

VertexOne provides a cloud customer information system and customer engagement suite for utilities, serving electricity, gas, water and multi service providers as well as competitive retailers. The product line is organised as VXcis for the core customer information system, VXconnect for engagement, VXexchange for data interchange and VXretail for retail energy providers.

Separating the retail product from the regulated utility product is a meaningful distinction. A competitive retailer and a regulated utility have different problems: the retailer must acquire and retain customers in a market where switching is easy, while the regulated utility serves everyone in a territory and answers to a regulator on service quality. Billing them from the same product without differentiation would serve neither well.

VXexchange addresses market data interchange, which is the unglamorous plumbing of deregulated energy markets. When customers switch supplier, meter data and account records must move between market participants in defined formats to defined deadlines, and getting that wrong produces billing failures that surface as complaints months later.

Cloud delivery is the deployment model, which for utilities running long lived on premises systems is the significant change. It shifts upgrades and infrastructure to the vendor, which matters where in house IT capacity is limited relative to the size of the customer base being served.