Group items tagged

The Aug. 15 edition of GreenTechMedia includes the following article discussing the future of the smart grid. The article highlights smart grid expert Andres Carvallo's presentation from The Soft Grid 2012 conference, and notes his comments regarding utilities' adoption of cloud computing and the utility "big data" challenge. The article mentions that Austin Energy is working on with Oracle on an IT-based project. The article also includes a comment from Oracle Utilities' Linda Jackman noting that utilities have their own reasons to keep as much of their IT work in-house as possible, but investor-owned utilities in particular are under pressure to spend on IT capital expenses, which they can recover in rate cases, rather than on operational expenses like cloud services that do not offer such guaranteed payback.

The Aug. 14 edition of GreenTechMedia includes the following article highlighting the ten predictions and trends for what the utilities industry will see in the software and smart grid market in coming years identified by the keynote speakers at GreenTechMedia's The Soft Grid 2012 conference. The fourth trend sited in the article notes the increasing role of open-source platforms in terms of distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. The article notes that legacy players in the industry, such as Oracle, are building solutions around new open-source platforms.

Article highlighting Silver Spring Networks' launch of its cloud service, SilverLink, to help share smart grid data. The article notes that the kind of tight operational integration that Silver Spring does with meter data management software partners, such as Oracle, is several levels of complexity higher than the data presentment it's doing via SilverLink. The article also mentions Oracle Utilities' "Big Data, Bigger Opportunities" survey, noting that a significant number of utilities that have deployed smart meters aren't putting their data to use for business processes and decision-making.

Article highlighting an approach PowerWatch is taking to India's power grid peak use and blackout problems, which involves smart air conditioners that can send real-time power usage data from smart metering back to a utility and use the data for analytics and planning. The article notes that according to Oracle's recent "Big Data, Bigger Opportunities" report, very few utilities are taking advantage of the influx of smart grid data.

Highlighting Linda Jackman's comments from a keynote address at The Networked Grid conference that Oracle is placing a larger focus on opportunities with water utilities.