 Silver Spring Networks Success Story Implementation of the Smart Grid is one of the most important clean technology initiatives of the coming decade - John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Silver Spring Networks is at the forefront of the implementation of Smart Grid solutions that enable utilities to achieve operational efficiencies, reduce carbon emissions and empower their customers to monitor and manage their energy consumption. To do this, they have developed the Silver Spring Smart Energy Platform, an open, IP-based utility networking infrastructure that makes the Smart Grid possible and is being deployed in organizations as varied as PG&E and Modesto Irrigation District in California to utilities such as CitiPower in Australia. Over the last year, just as Silver Spring has been helping their customers build the Smart Grid, so they have also been building their internal applications grid based on a mix of on-premise and Cloud applications. Their first experience of an Cloud project came when they needed to fulfill a contractual obligation to provide portal based access to Service Level Agreement information for one of their major customers. Initially, Silver Spring tried to do this by extending the use of JIRA, their engineering and support case tracking system, but it became clear that this could not be easily done. Faced with this need, Silver Spring engaged DSG to help them design and deploy a dashboard style SLA performance reporting solution through a support portal. The first iteration of this a simple, self-service portal for a single customer but the success of this project and its rapid – 4 week – implementation convinced Silver Spring to extend the functionality and reach of this portal to all of their customers. The customer support portal now enables customers to log and view support cases; to change the priority of these cases; close their own tickets, and, most importantly, to create their own views to monitor their SLA information. Typical of high-growth companies, this was just one example of where growth had outpaced the capability of Silver Spring’s systems to keep pace with business needs. Another example was around their forecasting and account planning needs which had originally been met using a number of Excel spreadsheets. With a complex, multi-stage sales cycle that often stretches to 18 months and a sales team planned to grow to 30 thirty people in 2010, Silver Spring decided in late 2009 that the risks inherent in trusting their sales systems to Excel were too great and that the time was right to extend their Salesforce.com implementation to their sales processes. Teaming with Silver Spring’s VP Sales Operations, DSG defined sales processes, configured these in Salesforce.com, and migrated valuable pipeline data from Excel into Salesforce.com to ensure business continuity. Working against an ambitious 4 week implementation schedule, DSG delivered the new forecasting and opportunity management system in January 2010. This system has subsequently been enhanced to support Blackberry and iPhone access as well as dashboards to provide executives with visibility into key activity based sales metrics. “What we saw with Silver Spring Networks is typical of many high-growth customers” says Todd Fitzwater, co-founder of DSG. “Often there is a need for a specific solution that needs to be delivered in a very short window and where an Cloud approach is really the only way to get the project done. But this often leads to more projects and that’s why Cloud platforms like Salesforce.com and NetSuite make so much sense - you can start small, deliver rapid time-to-value and then keep delivering business value as adoption expands within the organization”. About Silver Spring Networks About Demand Solutions Group |
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