Modern data-driven platforms are ideal for navigating today’s once-in-a-generation change in the power industry. They offer agility, efficiency-enhancing automation, and stimulate digital transformation in the energy sector.

However, legacy systems are the reality for most energy retailers, sometimes custom-built and often serving as reliable backbones of their organizations.

Technologies and systems are constantly evolving, meaning legacy tech is a fact of life for IT teams. But in a rapidly changing environment, it’s not a case of learning to live with these systems but optimizing them. Not just maintaining them but harnessing them to give your organization a competitive edge.

We’ll explore these approaches in this blog, but first, we’ll take a look at the challenges that legacy systems bring to energy retailers and pricing teams and how integration can breathe new life into older technologies.

Legacy Tech is a Fact of Life for Energy Retailers

If you were starting from scratch, you might not choose the legacy systems at the heart of your organization, but there are many reasons why energy retailers have come to rely on them.

While some legacy systems become unstable over time, others have been fine-tuned by successive IT teams to become dependable workhorses. They may not be flexible or agile, but they’re reliable.

Then there’s the risk of downtime. Updating systems, particularly mission-critical ones, can lead to service and business interruption. Custom-built systems may be central to business operations and difficult to disentangle from multiple, complex integrations.

Where legacy systems are familiar, it takes time for employees to get used to new software, and there can be disruption as the new system takes time to stabilize. Cost is also a factor. While legacy systems are notoriously expensive to maintain, full-scale replacement is nothing to scoff at.  

But It’s Holding Them Back

Legacy tech may offer short-term stability, but it gets in the way of innovation, and it’s stopping energy retailers from keeping up with the pace of change. Here’s how:

1. It Leads to Siloed Data

Not only does this risk duplicated data and increased IT costs, but it also impedes the free flow of data. Without ready access to data, pricing teams struggle to innovate competitive tariffs or offer the bespoke products that Industrial & Commercial (I&C) customers want.

2. It Slows Down Pricing Teams

With duplicated, poor-quality data, pricing teams can’t make the most of energy retail software solutions, emerging technologies, or automation. Accessing data and navigating complex processes absorbs the time that could be better spent creating innovative, market-leading products.

3. It Struggles with Real-Time Data

Pricing teams need real-time data for day-to-day operations, but legacy tech often struggles to process high volumes of energy data and real-time data streams.

4. It’s a Barrier to Innovation

There’s been a step change in the way that today’s pricing teams operate compared to just a few years ago. Legacy tech makes it difficult for them to design the green, flexible, time-of-use products that consumers are increasingly demanding As technology keeps advancing, retailers must continuously adapt to thrive in the energy industry of the future. 

5. Demoralized Employees

As a digital-first generation enters the energy sector, many find legacy systems with a complicated User Interface frustrating. Slow, difficult-to-use systems can lead to demoralized workers and high staff turnover.

The Role of Integration in Digital Transformation

While green tariffs and cost are motivating factors for today’s energy customers, improved customer service is a key consideration for those looking to switch providers. The challenge for energy retailers is to provide the service customers expect while delivering the speed and innovation that today’s energy retail market demands.

Integrations can help deliver both. By integrating legacy systems with modern platforms, energy retailers can offer customers close to real-time updates on their energy consumption via customer portals and apps. They can improve the speed and accuracy of billing processes, making it simpler and easier for customers to pay.

If siloed systems hamper innovation, integration is the foundation for digital transformation in the energy sector. Easy access to a single source of truth is the starting point for competitive pricing, growth, and increased profit margins.

Rip and Replace vs Phased Integration

A root and branch replacement of legacy, mission-critical, and custom-built systems is impractical for most organizations. Not only are the costs prohibitive, but it risks disruption and instability. Compromising either side of the stability / innovation equation puts productivity and profitability at risk.

Integrations offer solutions and work with existing systems to deliver agility and flexibility. By connecting these systems with modern tools, for example, with solutions that enable advanced analytics, the lifecycle of legacy systems is extended, helping organizations benefit from energy retail software solutions.

How Gorilla Enables Seamless Integration

By integrating legacy systems with a modern, cloud-based platform, energy retailers can centralize pricing knowledge across their tech stack. This breaks down siloed information and allows energy retailers to process and analyze data in near real-time, unlocking flexible, competitive tariffs.

It’s why a modern approach to IT architecture can become a differentiator for energy retailers, helping them to maintain market position and profitability. Here’s how:

1. Unifying disparate data sources into a single, actionable platform

IT leaders are looking for ways to break down internal data silos and centralize fragmented data across their tech stack, but pricing teams must also connect with external data sources, for example, broker portals. By integrating with these sources, retailers can keep pace with volatile energy markets and ensure their pricing is competitive while remaining profitable.

These third-party sources are increasingly important as we shift to a distributed, renewables-based system and demand response markets continue to expand. In this environment, weather data enriches energy data for more accurate forecasting, and smart meter data is critical for flexible and Time-of-Use tariff innovation.

With this mixture of internal and external data sources, a Data Cloud is an ideal platform. It ingests every type of data, making it accessible for advanced analytics.  Gorilla’s Data Cloud is tailored to energy retailers’ needs, bridging data silos and delivering configurable, energy-specific data processes.

Energy retailers with legacy tech can still transform into data-driven organizations, integrating energy data systems for better insights. This improved data visibility and processing helps energy retailers keep pace with dynamic markets.

2. Automating workflows to reduce manual errors and inefficiencies

Slow processes and manual data pipelines don’t give retailers the agility and market responsiveness they need. Manual input is also more prone to mistakes, potentially leading to pricing errors affecting profit margins or impacting regulatory compliance.

Automation reduces the risk of errors and duplication, saves employee time, boosts efficiencies, and minimizes potential bottlenecks.

A Data Hub helps organizations process large volumes of data. It goes beyond data storage capabilities to standardize and organize data, aligning with governance and metadata strategies.

This standardization helps with data sharing and automation. A Data Hub comes into its own with Extract, Transfer and Load, (ETL) and data pipeline automation, reducing system integration costs.  

3. Boosting Flexibility and Scalability with Integration Tools

Flexibility and scalability have become priorities for energy retailers. Customization is also essential for many. Gorilla's API approach enables all three.

With Gorilla’s API, even energy retailers that still use legacy technologies can find the platform beneficial. APIs have detailed documentation and are designed with users – and reuse - in mind. They can support multiple integrations, so new APIs don’t have to be built from scratch every time.

An API-first approach is modular, so one part of the system can be changed without affecting other components. Large quantities of data can be shared in real-time, including with external organizations, making it easier to scale and innovate.

With a modern approach to IT architecture, energy retailers can evolve as the market changes. Organizations can put unified energy data to work, applying real-time analytics to make faster, more accurate decisions. Operational efficiencies are boosted, and with vastly improved visibility, pricing teams can react to market changes, creating market-leading – and profitable – products.

With the right IT architecture, retailers’ IT teams can support this transformation, bridging the gap between legacy systems and modern platforms. This new approach can future-proof organizations while ensuring they have the stability and reliability both regulators and end-users expect. Interested in learning more? Check out our latest flipbook on how to turn your data infrastructure from a constraint into a catalyst for growth.