Agility has won funding from the New Zealand government to support its ongoing research and development (R&D) programme.

The Ministry of Science & Innovation has included Agility CIS in its latest round of funding to receive a Technology Development Grant, covering a three-year period from July 2011. The grant will meet up to 20% of Agility's total R&D spending over the next three years.

Dean Williamson, Agility's CEO, welcomed the announcement. "We are delighted that the government recognises our contribution to New Zealand's economy," he said. "Our R&D programme will help us to grow as a company, to increase New Zealand's export earnings and employ graduates of New Zealand universities in a growing industry. This grant supports those aims."

Agility is a wholly New Zealand-owned and -based business with a strong R&D programme and a high level of export sales.

The Technology Development Grant supports firms with a good track record in R&D, and which spend a significant proportion of their revenue on R&D. Almost $50 million will be invested in this round into 19 businesses in the high value manufacturing sector.

Prime Energy serves electricity, gas and water billing services mostly to strata title holders in the Auckland area. Now it's looking to grow its business to compete for customers in contestable markets.

It's a big step. To compete in the contestable energy markets in New Zealand, you need to show compliance with a small library of codes, regulations and standards, all designed to demonstrate that you can handle and analyse data correctly, bill customers accurately, and deal fairly with other market players.

When Prime looked around for a billing solution to meet its needs, Orion from Agility was a clear front runner. Not only was it proven in the New Zealand market, but Agility was also willing to host the database for Prime. That's a big infrastructure saving for a small company, and allows Prime to focus its spending where it will do the most good for its own expansion.

We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Prime Energy.

Tonga is the latest country to join the list of those using the Orion CIS system.

Tonga Power Ltd has entered a new era in customer management, upgrading its billing system from a legacy FoxPro database to a modern, fully relational solution supplied by Agility CIS.

The unique nature of Tonga's electricity market, and the special issues associated with serving a nation of multiple small islands, called for a highly configurable solution, capable of running on off-the-shelf, standarised hardware, and fitting with well established company procedures. Orion's flexible architecture lends itself well to easy configuration to match a company's existing infrastructure and procedures.

Tonga Power was looking to upgrade its system to a state-of-the-art solution running on modern platforms, without having to rewrite its whole business around the billing solution. Using the Orion solution, it is now able to accurately record costs and revenue, allowing it to target the real causes of revenue leakage in confidence that its billing is accurate and reliable. Going forward, Agility will naturally be happy to support the extended process of identifying revenue leakage.

The installation went live at the end of November 2010, since when an average of 10,000 new invoices have been issued each month. Agility continues to monitor key system performance indicators.

'Smart metering' is a well established technology for large electricity users, but there's a growing push to fit such meters for all customers. Smart meters offer enormous advantages for energy providers and retailers, and they empower consumers to make more informed decisions about their own energy usage.

In Australia, where the largest Orion users are based, smart metering is taking off in a big way. In 2009 the state of Victoria began rolling out smart meters, with the intention to have the entire state converted by the end of 2013.

From the retailer's point of view, the benefits are obvious. Smart meters allow for more precise and responsive tariffs, and for customer charges that reflect the actual costs of providing power in real time. Moreover, they remove the need for meter readers to manually visit every site every few months - a major ongoing cost saving - and greatly reduce the company's reliance on estimated reads for billing, which is always a cause of uncertainty and sometimes of customer dissatisfaction.

But this convenience comes at a cost. Instead of one meter read every two or three months, now we need to store one read for every half hour. That's a several-thousand-fold increase in the volume of data to be stored, which needs to be analysed and aggregated in order to produce accurate invoices.

Orion's Advanced Metering module separates the meter data from the main database. All meter reads are stored, but the AM database also aggregates data at various levels of granularity ready to serve to Orion when needed. So when the invoicing process wants to know, for instance, 'how many units did this customer use during the daytime on public holidays during January?', the AM database doesn't need to look up every half-hourly value and calculate the answer - the information is ready and waiting to be served up.

This allows Orion to generate invoices based on complete and accurate data, in no more time than it would take to calculate from monthly reads. Orion AM is a sophisticated service that positions our customers well to take every advantage of the smart metering revolution.