Itron Completes Another Round of High-Scale Benchmark Testing for Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management

LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. — January 7, 2009 — Itron Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI) announced today its completion of another successful round of scalability and performance benchmark testing for its Itron Enterprise Edition (IEE) Meter Data Management (MDM) product. The tests confirm the software's ability to support advanced metering system (AMI) installations of more than 9.6 million hourly meters, representing the largest-scale independent testing in the meter data management industry to date.

Itron, working with Agilysys, Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions, HP, and Infosys executed the latest high-volume IEE MDM benchmark on Oracle® Database Enterprise Edition. It confirmed that IEE MDM not only meets the current needs of the largest utility companies, but can scale as Itron customers deploy increasingly sophisticated large-scale AMI solutions.

Results also show that IEE on Oracle needs less than three hours to validate, auto-estimate, and import 4.8 million half-hourly meters, each having one register and one interval channel—a volume equivalent to hourly data for 9.6 million meters. The test included calculating estimations for 0.5 percent to 10 percent of the meters.

The testing took into account the full range of data processing requirements for large-scale AMI deployments, including interval meter data import,data validation, estimation and storage, as well as the daily demand for time-of-use (TOU) calculations and billing exports (500,000/day, assuming 20 cycle days per month). Using IEE MDM high-volume AMI import and export services, Itron achieved the level of performance and scalability required to exceed the demands of full-scale AMI deployments.

"We believe that benchmarking is a reflection of the commitment a company makes in itself, its products and its customers," said Julie Hance, vice president of Itron software solutions. "Benchmarking to this scale year after year, release after release, requires a significant investment, but the investment is more than worthwhile. Our highest-ever volume has been achieved in this recent benchmark-all to the ultimate benefit of our 40+ customers and the 26 million meters that utilize our MDM system."

Itron additionally tested and verified that IEE Mass Market Customer Care, its product for providing web presentment via portlet technology for customer service and end-consumer usage, can scale to meet the demands of thousands of concurrent AMI users (2.75 second average response time; 1,800 users per Web server). Testing also included virtualization software on the application servers with no impact on processing and throughput.

Agilysys assisted with the infrastructure design, project managed the benchmark, and provided ongoing Oracle support, as well as UNIX and Windows operating system support. Testing and development was done using Infosys AMI Center of Excellence resources and testing was completed entirely on an HP Integrity mission-critical enterprise server with Intel® Itanium® processors running HP-UX 11i v3 operating system,and utilized an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array and blade servers for validation/estimation. The benchmark tests were performed at the Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions' Solutions Center in Alpharetta, Ga.