Opower to Host Webinar on Converting Smart Grid Data into Real Customer Value

As smart meters steadily come online and utilities strive to provide their clients with better tools to understand their energy use, the amount of data being generated, transmitted, and analyzed is growing exponentially. Drew and Alex will share their experiences establishing Opower’s robust cloud-based computing environment that interfaces with more than 60 utilities and new tools available for working with large amounts of data.

Drew Hylbert is Opower’s Engineering Director, overseeing the architecture team and overall software and systems design from the company’s San Francisco office. He was the evangelist behind the adoption of the Hadoop-based data storage infrastructure for time-series and event data, allowing Opower to scale data storage and processing infrastructure quickly and cost-effectively. Prior to Opower, Drew was Vice President of Engineering at hi5.com, a social gaming and virtual good transaction platform where he was responsible for architecture and infrastructure teams. His work there led to the creation of a “friend relevancy system,” which processed ~1B events/day and returned relevant ordered lists in less than 100ms. Prior to hi5, Drew was a member of Yahoo’s map/reduce and data warehousing infrastructure team. His work there included the implementation of distributed processes across Yahoo’s network of content, which consumed about 3TB of data for a particular day’s worth of traffic. Drew earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.