IBM and Smart Energy Water have signed an agreement to boost the global energy and water provider’s cloud platform with the addition of IBM’s cloud infrastructure to host its mobile and web apps.

US-based Smart Energy Water will host various workloads on IBM’s cloud platform, including its customer and mobile workforce apps, online billing, energy efficiency monitoring, reward programmes and data collection tools.

SEW will offer the infrastructure for other energy businesses to build their apps upon IBM’s cloud. The utilities tech provider works with more than 150 energy and water businesses around the world, so this is a noteworthy deal for IBM.

“Consumers are open to new ways of engaging with their utility,» said Harman Sandhu, President at Smart Energy Water. «Together with IBM, we can deliver solutions at large scale that help utilities lower the cost-to-serve by moving customers from the call center to lower-cost digital channels, personalize service to increase overall customer satisfaction, and target customers for the right opportunities for value-added programs and services.»

The five-year deal will help SEW expand its offerings into analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT), helping clients develop a more diverse set of tools to benefit customers.

“Smart Energy Water is anticipating the major impact connected technologies will have on their customers business,» said Brad Gammons, global managing director, IBM Energy, Environment and Utilities. «By investing in data, their workers can do their job better than ever before and customers will have access to self-service capabilities that can help improve client service.»

IBM has sealed deals with some pretty big businesses of late, including BNP Paribas and Vodafone.