It is a challenge for businesses to manage, analyze and utilize the huge amount of data produced every day. Enterprises that grow through acquisitions have an even greater challenge: also dealing with data sets inherited from other companies.

North America’s largest residential energy supplier, Direct Energy, is using the services of Io-Tahoe LLC to learn from the data generated by its current customers, but also to integrate and leverage the data from newly acquired companies.

“Every time we acquire organizations, they have various different applications running in the estate,” said Eddie Edwards (pictured, right), global data services director at Direct Energy. “What we’re able to do is use the product to plug in and then profile to understand what knowledge they have around their customer base and how we can bring that in to build up a single view and offer additional products.”

Edwards and David Piester (pictured, left), head of global sales at Io-Tahoe LLC, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. They discussed how Direct Energy is leveraging different datasets with the help of Io-Tahoe and how many companies do not know the possible uses for their data. (* Disclosure below.)

Analyzing data to offer news products and reduce costs

After analyzing data from acquired companies, Direct Energy is able to make appropriate offers for its new customers, from rewards programs to value-added products, such as its heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning.

“It is opening up new opportunities and territories to us,” Edwards said.

Because of the acquisitions, Direct Energy now has around 5,000 employees and just under 1,700 applications in its portfolio. One of the company’s challenges when dealing with the portfolio is to reduce costs so that it can pass savings on to its consumers. There is also the challenge of applying laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, to stored information.

“We are about four months in, and in terms of benefits, ROI, probably around 300% at the moment,” Edwards said. “We’ve got some of the basic savings around the storage side, but we’re also getting large savings from some of the existing support agreements that we have in place.” The company has been able to reduce the amount of people that are required to support the team, for example.

Many enterprises do not know their data and the possible uses for these information, according to Piester. Io-Tahoe aims to enable data governance, cataloging all data, including sensitive information. “What differentiates us is the machine learning,” Piester pointed out. “So a billion rows, 100,000 columns, large complex data sets — we interrogate every field value.”

Data cataloging makes it easy for organizations to automatically discover and search for all their information. It also helps companies’ journey to the cloud.

“A lot of people want to go to the cloud but can’t get access to the data, don’t understand it,” Piester explained. “We’re that bridge; we are a key strategic partner for AWS, and we are excited about the opportunity that’s come about in the last six months with AWS.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Io-Tahoe LLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Io-Tahoe nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE