Advancing KUBRA’s Storm Center Outage Mapping

July 12, 2022

The following article on KUBRA Storm Center was published on the  Xweather website in July 2022.

Background

KUBRA is an industry-leading provider of cloud-based customer experience management solutions for utility, insurance, government, and other entities across North America. More than a tagline, “Experience Better” captures KUBRA’s overall mission and what you can expect in all the products and services they offer. Their extensive portfolio of solutions includes billing and payments, artificial intelligence, and utility mapping – which is where Xweather comes into play.

Storm Center, KUBRA’s power outage map solution, is a mobile-friendly platform that allows users to visualize the impacts of severe weather on their local utility or telecom provider. This interactive tool gives KUBRA clients and their customers the opportunity to prepare for and monitor outages in their region and provides them with critical restoration updates and timeframes.

Always looking to improve and expand their products and features, KUBRA reached out to Xweather to improve contextual weather visualization for Storm Center. These key features were needed for their electric utility and telecommunication clients - two industries who understand the challenges that arise from severe weather such as storms, ice, lightning, and hail.

You can read about how KUBRA provided millions of Texas electric utility customers with such critical restoration updates in their case study on the infamous February 2021 winter ice storm here.

Challenge

Storm Center relies on weather data provided by an external source. Since launching, the popularity of the feature has grown, creating a need for a weather data provider that could both amplify KUBRA’s outage mapping experience and keep up with the large volume of clients they are serving – 61,000,000 meters and growing. The scope of Storm Center required a provider that delivered the following:

  1. Developer-friendly radar layer integration to display improved visuals over their existing client location maps
  2. Expanded layer options such as lightning, tropical cyclones, forecast precipitation, storm tracking, and storm cells
  3. Scalability to allow for great fluctuations in traffic/demand due to extreme weather events, as KUBRA experienced during the Texas 2021 event

Solution

Xweather and KUBRA worked closely to conduct extensive load testing and data inspection during the onboarding phase. This hands-on approach created a bi-directional partnership, making both teams and solutions stronger and ensuring that together, we could meet the customer demand under even the most extreme weather conditions with little to no performance degradation.

Results

Xweather’s radar layer was successfully integrated into Storm Center in July of 2021. Since then, KUBRA has been able to provide the improved benefits of Storm Center to a growing roster of utility and telecommunication clients, serving millions of users through their innovative outage mapping solutions. The synergistic results of the partnership between KUBRA and Xweather, provides KUBRA’s client’s and their customers the confidence that they will always stay ahead of Mother Nature. 

To learn more about Storm Center and KUBRA’s outage mapping options, click here.