10/09/2003

Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration and business intelligence software, says Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, a subsidiary of WPS Resources Corporation, has selected the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform to help improve customer service through enhanced customer analysis.

“As competition in our industry emerges, it is essential that we maintain a deep understanding of our customer base so we can continue to meet their evolving needs,” said Nancy Fictum, IT project manager at Wisconsin Public Service. “We selected Informatica PowerCenter to help us enable strategic customer analysis because of its proven performance, as well as its metadata-centric architecture, which will give us more confidence in our data by enabling impact analysis and data lineage tracking.”

Informatica explains that, “Wisconsin Public Service provides electricity and natural gas to more than 450,000 customers in northeast Wisconsin and a portion of upper Michigan. To provide its account management representatives with information about how customers are using its energy, the company is developing a data warehouse for detailed analysis by location, type of customer, and usage loads and times. This data will help the company’s marketing team to better target and price new and existing products and services. In addition, Wisconsin Public Service’s research and planning departments will be able to better estimate capacity and facility needs by analyzing customer usage patterns.”

“With the impact of deregulation, utility companies must become more agile in order to ward off competition,” said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Informatica. “We are pleased to work with a forward-looking company such as Wisconsin Public Service to help ensure that their management is equipped with timely, accurate business information.”

According to Informatica, “By using PowerCenter to migrate billing and meter data from its 14-year-old customer information system into a client/server data warehouse environment, Wisconsin Public Service expects to reduce time-to-deployment and streamline integration, in turn enabling more efficient support for business users. Wisconsin Public Service will also use PowerCenter to support its future initiatives to expand customer analysis. In 2004, Wisconsin Public Service plans to complete the implementation of automated meter reading, which will read customers’ meters every hour, rather than every month. Wisconsin Public Service will use PowerCenter to feed these large amounts of data into the data warehouse for more detailed analysis across the enterprise.”

“Informatica PowerCenter is the industry-leading data integration platform for building, deploying and managing enterprise data warehouses, as well as other data integration projects. Informatica PowerCenter helps users transform data from disparate enterprise systems and sources into reliable information to support strategic business initiatives,” Informatica asserts.