Xylem Accelerates Solution Innovation with Data Lakes on AWS

Xylem is a leading water technology company committed to "solving water" by creating innovative and smart technologies to meet the world's water, wastewater, and energy needs. According to Grant Muller, vice president of software at Xylem, the company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud service provider in large part due to its data lake capabilities.

In 2014, the company was in the process of setting up a Hadoop cluster for its data analysis and began creating a data lake. "Once we moved to a serverless data lake environment, we were able to migrate everything from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It became a lot easier for us to enable a lot of work in parallel," explains Muller. For instance, Xylem could have its business analyst running simple queries in Amazon Athena and simultaneously have its data scientists running forecast models with Amazon Forecast or with custom software using Amazon EMR. This allows for more experimentation in a given week compared to when Xylem was operating a hardware data lake. “The biggest output for our customers is we can solve their problems faster,” says Muller.

In addition, Xylem is experiencing faster time-to-market in a secure way with AWS solutions. “There are so many audit requirements and governance rules— General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—AWS checks the box for us so all we have to do is bring an additional layer of security on top of that,” explains Muller.

To learn more about AWS for Power & Utilities, visit aws.amazon.com/power-and-utilities.