Customer Stories

First established in 1998, PayPal has been a subsidiary of eBay for the majority of the last 20 years. PayPal now operates across 33 data centers and facilitates more than 6 billion payment transactions per year. In 2014, eBay announced plans to separate PayPal and turn it into its own company, initiating a long journey for PayPal toward independence. Shawn Tugwell, Senior Data Center Engineering Manager at PayPal, recently told the story of that journey during the PI World 2018 conference in San Francisco.

Data center co-location provider, Aligned Energy has long used the PI System for traditional applications such as monitoring the power distribution and cooling in their data centers. But when they began looking for a way to make their power usage monitoring and billing systems more transparent and tailored to their customers' varied needs, they devised a strategy to reach their transparency and flexibility goals by using Aligned Energy's existing PI System data in new ways.

Sempra Energy is one of the largest energy providers in the country. With over 3000MW of solar, wind, and energy storage, Sempra Renewables (a subsidiary of Sempra Energy) delivers renewable energy to over 32 million customers around the world. A few years ago, Sempra Renewables bought the rights to development of Great Valley Solar, which is a 200MW solar facility just outside of Fresno, CA. Spanning nearly 1200 football fields of solar modules, the vast complex will provide enough energy to power nearly 90,000 homes. Site construction was done in phases, resulting in four plants tied together with one single substation. Each of the plants as well as the Ocho substation had its own SCADA system used to control and manage each plant. Managing five different SCADA systems was already expensive, but an upgrade to an already cumbersome solution would prove to be even more costly. David Jeon, the Fleet Technical Manager at Sempra Renewables, needed another solution.