Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing Utilities and Energy Solutions Provider Companies

CXO Standpoint
data that utilities are struggling to manage and create new
business value from.
• More than smart meters, the term “smart grid” implies
grid devices, assets and data interacting in real time and
with less human intervention to respond to changing grid
conditions. This degree of interoperability and
automation has been elusive or cost-prohibitive thus far
for the low-voltage level of the network.
Most of these challenges are technology-centered, while
some are cultural and organizational, but the upside is that
these challenges are being solved. Information technology
and operational technology are converging rapidly in the
utility and energy space to create a new strategic and
operational reality. This comes none too soon in light of
significant business challenges utilities worldwide are
facing as well as the economic and environmental
challenges we all face.
Led by companies such as Cisco and Itron, a growing
ecosystem of smart grid technology providers have
collaborated to evolve network architecture so that utility
field area networks look and behave much more like
enterprise IT networks. Solution providers are also
introducing more distributed intelligence to grid operations
that enable grid assets and devices that are currently
“siloed” to work in concert with one another. In addition,
the available value stream of this network infrastructure
investment is broadening by connecting to emerging
markets and applications such as smart cities and the
Internet of Things (IoT).
The heavy lifting really began four years ago when Itron
and Cisco announced an agreement to work together to rearchitect
Itron’s widely-deployed OpenWay smart grid
network to IPv6 architecture from Cisco. This joint
development effort, undertaken by the industry leaders in
utility automation and networking, was a watershed effort
in the industry. The smart metering network became a
multi-application smart grid and smart city network,
broadening significantly its usefulness and value. A
growing ecosystem of leading smart grid technology
providers can now build to a common reference architecture
through the Connected Grid Cisco Developer Network to
accelerate adoption and spark innovation.
But standards-based, multi-application network architecture
by itself was not enough to address all those challenges.
Itron believes that for the smart grid to deliver on its
promised value, data analysis and action must take place
where it makes most sense-increasingly at the edge of the
network rather than in the utility back office. That’s the
whole idea behind ITRON RIVA, a new distributed
intelligence and advanced communication platform the
company launched this fall.
Distributing intelligence across the network allows us to
economically solve utility problems that couldn’t be
feasibly solved before, greatly increasing the value and
timeliness of smart grid analytic applications as well as the
utilization of network capacity. Specifically, these
development efforts yield a new and common set of
technology attributes for meters, grid sensors and other
types of intelligent devices, whether they come from Itron
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