2022 DTECH - Don Reeves

🎥 Jun 03, 2022 📺 Itron ⏱ 2m 👁 260 views

Itron Senior Vice President of Outcomes, Don Reeves, shares insights from the 2022 DISTRIBUTECH floor. He talks about this ...

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About Donald Reeves

At the 2022 DISTRIBUTECH conference, Don Reeves, Senior Vice President of the Outcomes business unit at Itron, discussed the company’s focus on converting raw data into actionable insights for utility customers. He stated that customers often tell him, “I’ve got data coming in, I don’t know what to do with it,” and described his unit’s role as transforming that data into insights for operators, customer support, and grid planning staff. Reeves noted that the conversation with customers has shifted from explaining edge computing and distributed intelligence to customers asking “how quickly can I go take advantage of that.” Reeves also emphasized the importance of partnerships, saying “Itron alone cannot do it all” and that the company “absolutely need[s] a village of a strong ecosystem.” He highlighted a deepened partnership with Microsoft, describing the company as “one of the leading cloud providers” and stating that the collaboration aims to accelerate customers’ move to the cloud with pre-integrated solutions. Reeves expressed satisfaction with the progress since the previous DISTRIBUTECH, noting that the company is now demonstrating working products and customer success stories rather than prototypes.

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Transcript (4 segments)

Donald Reeves0:06

Hi, my name is Don Reeves. I am the Senior Vice President of the Outcomes Business Unit for Itron. I really enjoy my time here at DistribuTECH. It's been awesome reconnecting with colleagues, customers, partners, co-workers that I haven't seen in months or in some cases years in person. Really excited about what we've got in our booth and all the new product we're showing. It feels like it's a whole new Itron from where we were two years ago. And certainly as I walk around the show floor, I see lots of exciting developments in the area of the grid, the distribution grid, and thinking about how we can tie into that. So just super exciting to see where the industry is heading.

The outcomes tag line is 'Intelligence that empowers.' And certainly the broader notion of more possibilities, more intelligence, it's really all about how we give those insights to our customers. I hear this repeatedly from customers: 'I've got data coming in, I don't know what to do with it.' So it's really all about how do we take that raw data and transform it into actual insights that we can deliver into the hands of the operators, into the hands of the customer support folks, into the hands of the grid planning folks so they can make better decisions and be more effective in their jobs.

I think when we were here two years ago, we were showing off the Riva meter and we were talking about what we could do with AI. Now we're here talking about what we have done with AI. We have our customers out talking about successes. We have examples in the booth of actual product working, actual results. So it's just really gratifying to see the progress the team has made. And as I think about the conversation we're now having with customers, we no longer have to explain to them what edge compute is or what distributed intelligence is all about. They're trying to figure out how quickly can I go take advantage of that.

We really value our partnerships because we recognize that Itron alone cannot do it all. We absolutely need a village of a strong ecosystem. What I see with Microsoft is they are one of the leading cloud providers. We have been partnering with them for years and we saw an opportunity to go do more, to accelerate, to align with our customers' needs to move more of their solutions into the cloud, and to bring in proven pre-integrated solutions. So that's really the opportunity we see with Microsoft: how we can accelerate our customers' movement and allow them to realize benefit even more rapidly.