Utilities

Utilities

Innovation is taking hold of this once conservative and slow-moving Industry.

A new report from Gartner, Inc. identifies the technology trends affecting the global energy and utility markets

“Searching for successful business models that will address these issues and generate anticipated shareholder returns in uncertain regulatory settings is a top priority for this industry,” said report author Kristian Steenstrup, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “This is in addition to protecting the security of critical generation and delivery infrastructure, as well as maintaining system reliability with aging physical assets. Public and private utilities are looking at how technology can reduce cost, drive efficiencies and enhance competitive advantage.”

Social Media and Web 2.0

Utility IT leaders have opportunities to use social media as a customer acquisition and retention medium for competitive energy retailers, as a consumer engagement channel to drive customer participation in energy efficiency programs and as the emerging area of crowd-sourcing distributed energy resources coordination. Social media for outage communications is also rising in importance and value for utilities and customers experiencing outages. Opportunities to use social media to improve internal utility business processes are starting to emerge.

Big Data

Smart grid development will increase data quantity by several orders of magnitude, driven by a host of edge devices, as well as new IT and OT applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart appliances, microgrids, advanced distribution management, remote asset monitoring, event avoidance and self-healing networks. In addition to significantly impacting data volume, smart grid initiatives will produce a different variety of data, such as temporal, spatial, transactional, streaming, structured and unstructured.

Mobile and Location-Aware Technology

Lowering costs and improving the accuracy and effectiveness of the field force are the main drivers for utilities to deploy mobile and wireless technologies. Mobile and location-aware technology spans hardware (such as ruggedized laptops, PDAs and smartphones), communication products (such as navigation, routing and tracking technologies like GPS) and services (such as cellular digital packet data and general packet radio service, using high-speed terrestrial data networks, Wi-Fi and satellites).

Cloud Computing and SaaS

Although the utility industry trails other sectors in cloud adoption due to security and reliability concerns, solutions are beginning to emerge in areas such as smart meter, big data analytics, demand response coordination and GIS. Early implementers of utility cloud and SaaS include organizations interested in providing common application and data services to multiple utility entities, such as cooperative associations and transmission system operators, smaller municipal and cooperatives without extensive infrastructure or budgets, and investor-owned utilities (IoUs) conducting short-term smart grid pilots interested in quick time-to-market, with minimal impact on production systems.

We at IT Caliber can address all these technological changes in the industry effectively and optimally.