Mounting pressure to react to dynamic market conditions with real-time energy pricing, ever-increasing volumes of energy data, and growing numbers of data streams to manage. Pricing is not an easy task for today’s energy retailers.

Sometimes it feels like they’re handling 21st-century energy pricing complexity with 20th-century technology. Spreadsheet analysis, manual processes, and a patchwork of in-house solutions that have developed over time. All too often, this leads to highly complicated IT architecture, siloed data, inefficient applications…and a frustrated pricing team.

What if there was a better way? What if there was a 21^st-century solution for 21st-century energy retail pricing complexity?

Gorilla’s cloud-based platform works with your existing tech stack to centralize energy data, delivering effective integration for all data sources. With improved data visibility, pricing teams can use advanced analytics for more accurate forecasting. Retailers can offer more agile pricing, leading to affordable, greener tariffs - a win-win for both pricing teams and customers.

Energy retailers need solutions that aren’t just built for today—but for what’s next. In this blog, we’ll explore the biggest integration challenges, how Gorilla is tackling them, and the innovative approaches shaping the future of the industry. Let’s take a closer look.

The Energy Data Integration Challenge for Retailers

Effective integration is the starting point for data accessibility and ultimately, innovation, business agility, and operational efficiencies. It gives energy retailers a head start in an increasingly competitive environment.

But this is a big challenge for many. Even in markets that pioneered liberalization, the incumbents dominate the retail market. In the U.K., the first liberalized market, the combined market share of the large legacy suppliers is still 69%.

Technology moves on so fast that even newer entrants to the market will have to deal with legacy issues and the following 4 common energy data integration challenges:

1. Multiple Legacy Systems Combined with Modern Applications

Legacy systems are often hard to integrate and unstable. They absorb way too much IT team time with complicated and time-consuming workarounds. Many have outdated and off-putting user interfaces, but integrating the older systems with modern, more user-friendly applications is often difficult, needing custom APIs, and still more time from the IT Department.

Over time, as more and more systems are added, retailers are left with an inflexible infrastructure that holds them back. They can’t move quickly enough to balance all the numerous, changeable elements of their price books or to give customers the tariffs they want.

2. Data Silos

Integration issues lead to data silos - the nemesis of pricing teams, enterprise architects, and IT teams alike.

Without data visibility and with poor-quality data, pricing teams can’t keep price books up-to-date and competitive. They’re navigating conflicting versions of the same data, when what they really need is a single source of truth.

And IT teams are all too aware that the legacy tech that creates these silos is a time drain, taking them away from other tasks that could have a bigger impact on the bottom line. Emerging technologies such as AI have transformative potential for retailers, but integration issues are getting in the way with 95% of IT Leaders highlighting integration as the top blocker for implementations.

3. Point to Point (P2P) Integrations

Organizations with multiple legacy systems often rely on point-to-point integrations. When they need new integrations quickly, P2P integrations are a fast, short-term fix. The problem is they are tightly coupled and hard to scale, particularly at the pace needed in today’s energy retail market. Each new system added to your tech stack needs multiple custom-built connections, making it hard for your organization to respond quickly to change.

Over time, P2P integrations lead to time-draining complexity. As your tech stack grows, complicated integrations add to the problem of siloed data. What’s more, with P2P integrations, data is transferred in large batches, instead of the real or near-real data streams today’s pricing teams need.

4. Additional Complexity from Real-Time Data

Legacy systems, siloed data, and P2P integrations struggle to cope with ever-increasing quantities of energy data. Settlement periods vary around the world, but the general trend is for shorter and shorter periods. The UK is moving to half hourly settlement through MHHS, the EU has begun to introduce 15 minute periods, while settlement periods for Australia and parts of the US are now as little as 5 minutes. All of these changes are increasing the flow of smart meter data. This data has huge potential for creating flexible and Time of Use tariffs, but only if the data can be analyzed in near real-time.

Without a single source of truth, leveraging advanced analytics in energy retail becomes hard, if not impossible. Retailers miss out on automation, modeling, improved forecasting, and the agility new technologies deliver and it’s difficult for sales teams to use real-time energy pricing to innovate and respond to markets and their customers.

Gorilla as a Central Integration Hub

Gorilla offers a unified, cloud-based platform, specifically developed for energy retailers. As a Data Cloud, it centralizes all your data, integrating with internal and external data sources, including broker portals. It offers configurable energy-specific data processing capabilities making life easier for pricing teams.

With a powerful, easy-to-use API, Gorilla can be quickly up and running without time-consuming custom API development. By connecting core applications including your CRM systems, billing engines, and business intelligence systems, your organization can transform into a data-driven business. Your sales teams are best placed to respond to market demands and offer customers innovative, market-leading products.

The Benefits of Centralizing Pricing Data with Gorilla

Here are just some of the ways your business benefits:

1. Reduced manual work frees up employees for innovation

Pricing teams can focus on strategy instead of manual processes and have more time to develop new products. When IT teams are no longer tied up maintaining complex legacy systems, they can explore emerging technologies and make the most of the efficiencies they offer.

2. Revenue Boosting Innovation

With reliable, consistent data comes more accurate pricing and improved profitability. Centralized pricing knowledge brings faster decision-making and agility. Sales teams can innovate competitive tariffs and bespoke packages for C&I customers, that bring affordability together with a greener offering.

3. A Competitive Edge

Energy retailers can transform into data-driven industry leaders, thriving in an increasingly competitive energy market. With automated processes and increased agility, retailers are better placed to manage complex portfolios, adapt as the market changes, and set themselves apart with customer-focused tariffs.

 4. Future-Ready IT Infrastructure

The pace of change in the sector is only going to increase. With a flexible, scalable infrastructure, energy retailers can navigate market volatility, regulatory pressures, and the complexities of an accelerating energy transition. With automated processes, they can not only simplify operations but become more efficient organizations as well.

5. Our Gorilla Implementation Team!

Our customers tell us our implementation team takes the time to really listen and understand the issues affecting their business. We think this is the best way to begin any project.

Gorilla is adaptable and customizable. This is especially important in such a highly regulated sector where maintaining control over processes is key. For example, a customer may need a pricing engine integrated with a complex, custom-built CRM solution or to automate an existing valuation process. We can tailor our software solutions to help overcome the challenges that are holding your team back.

Once we understand the issues, our technical team will identify the data sources and integrations needed, working with your existing tech stack. With on-premise legacy systems, SFTP server integration is a good solution. For customers further along in their digital transformation, API integration through middleware such as Mulesoft is an alternative. If you need to export vast amounts of data into a data lake, we support S3 data reduplication.

Gorilla is implemented through our fully-trained integration partners and we offer hands-on support through the implementation process. Our Integration Consultants often act as facilitators between integrators and customers, ensuring projects are delivered quickly and smoothly.

Ready to Unleash Your Data?

Energy retailers are already managing growing volumes of data. As the energy transition accelerates, the amount of data, number of data streams, and pressure for real-time energy pricing will only grow. Energy retailers can turn this challenge into an opportunity for increased innovation, offering the greener, lower-carbon products today’s C&I and residential customers both want.

However, a modern approach to IT infrastructure is vital.

At Gorilla, we’re ready to support your digital transformation with agile, data-driven applications. Our cloud-based platform integrates with industry and internal data sources, giving your team the centralized pricing knowledge they need to stay competitive. Discover how Gorilla can help you unleash your data.

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