As cities around the world face aging infrastructure, growing urban populations, government mandates and shrinking budgets, managing energy and water is critical to ongoing economic prosperity, resource conservation and social well-being. Itron and partners like Microsoft aim to help cities address these pressing challenges.

Microsoft announced CityNext, a global initiative empowering cities, businesses and citizens to re-imagine their futures and cultivate vibrant communities, at its Worldwide Partner Conference on July 10. As part of this initiative, Itron collaborated with Microsoft to design and deliver Itron Insights, an energy and water analyzer application.

The Itron Insights application, based on Windows 8 and Windows RT, provides cities with a clear view into energy costs, water revenue and expense, and CO2 impact. City leaders will have access to energy and water budgets and baselines, organized by locations and facility type. Easy to use dashboards with mapping capability offer access to energy and water expense tracking with drill down capability for further analysis. The dashboard also includes embedded alerts and task management to mitigate and investigate anomalies promptly for effective resource optimization.