Oracle Corp.’s financial department has a lot of paperwork to fill in the coming months. Last week, the vendor signed a $663 million agreement to acquire construction management specalist Textura Corp., and today, it’s buying Opower Inc. for $548 million. The transaction is poised to give the latter outfit’s shareholders a hefty 30.4 percent premium over its Friday closing value.

In exchange, Oracle will gain Opower’s line of cloud-based customer engagement applications for the utilities sector. The firm enables energy companies to aggregate usage information from the households they serve in a centralized environment, filter out errors and then push the distilled consumption statistics back to their install base through a neat web portal. The data is displayed in the form of straightforward visualizations that can show a user how much they’ve been paying for power and gas as well what they can expect to see on their next bill.

Utilities with bigger ambitions are also able to go a step further and employ the usage data they aggregate to produce personalized power-saving advice for each customer. The capability can come handy in several ways. First, it creates an opening to sell smart meters, energy-efficient appliances and other products that might help reduce a household’s utility bill. And second, the feature enables providers to deal with demand spikes much better than they could have ever hoped to before the availability of modern analytics functionality.

Opower makes it possible to publish the power-saving advice produced by its technology via mobile notifications that can be pushed out to a provider’s user base on a moment’s notice. Its website claims that the feature lets utilities curb consumption by up to three percent during peak hours, which amounts to a lot of power across an entire electricity grid. And the technology will only increase in value over time as the energy sector continues deploying more sensors and data gathering tools as part of the so-called Industrial Internet movement.

Another factor that will help Oracle exploit the trend is the fact that Opower’s services are used by more than 100 of the world’s largest electricity and gas providers. Put together with its own existing utility customers, that install base gives the company a strong foundation from which to launch its growth efforts.

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