Uniper

Providing sustainable energy for everyone with a modern digital platform

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With our new data analytics platform, powered by Talend, we now can better understand where the market is going, which helps us optimize energy trading while managing risk and complying with regulations.

René Greiner

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Create a scalable data platform for providing sustainable energy

10x increase

in the speed AND cost-efficiency of supplying real-time data

80% cost reduction

for data integration

120 internal and external sources

integrated into a central, cloud-based data lake


Global energy leader Uniper is in the midst of the biggest disruption in decades. Renewables and smart grid technologies have upended assumptions about capital planning, centralized vs. decentralized generation, and the underlying foundation of the business.

“We are in an increasingly complex world of ever-changing technologies and markets,” says René Greiner, Vice President for Data Integration. “We produce energy. We buy and sell energy via marketplaces. How much coal and gas do we need to produce today and in the future? How shall we expand our market positions? How can we maximize our profit and loss? Before we embarked on our cloud journey, we didn’t have our data readily available to quickly make these decisions.”

To create the Uniper Data Analytics Platform, Uniper selected Tableau along with Talend to integrate more than 120 internal and external data sources into a Snowflake central data lake in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. “Within 40 days,” says Greiner, “we were able to take 30 percent of our roadmap use cases live and prototype another 25 percent. And we reduced our integration costs by 80 percent in the process.”

Talend has been a game changer by supplying data ten times faster and ten times cheaper. Greiner explains, “We don’t want IT to be a bottleneck — we want it to be an enabler for self-service, which Talend makes possible. Self-service gives us an advantage in speed-to-market.”

The earlier trading teams can react, the earlier they can take a position that can make a difference of millions of euros. The data lake makes data available continuously and enables trading teams to automate trading. Now Uniper can move immediately to take a position when in the past it would take days to pull together the necessary data.

“Data governance, as provided by Talend, is essential to the success of the data lake,” adds Greiner. “If you want to rely on a platform like a data lake that contains data from disparate sources, you need a good data cataloging or data tagging mechanism, and you need to assign data owners. Talend provides those capabilities and helps us establish data lineage and the kind of security we need to comply with GDPR regulations.”