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Webinar: Will SOA Benefit The Energy & Utility Industry?
Hear about the cost savings and key benefits SOA is providing to utilities directly from an Energy Central vice president and a consultant with years of IT performance evaluation and gap analysis at Florida Power and Light, NSTAR and Exxel Energy.
Please register for immediate access to this on-demand webcast.
Will SOA Benefit The Energy & Utility Industry?
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a relatively new concept among utilities and energy companies. There has been some early adoption among ISOs (independent system operators) and independent power producers. Some utilities are in the early stages of examining SOA; there are some "semi-implementations", one might call them, among some of the larger utilities. The question is: how will SOA benefit the energy and utility industry? Another fair question might be: is the industry, at large, even prepared to enjoy these benefits? To answer these questions we must take a brief look at SOA history in the industry.
SOA History and the Utility Industry: IT Legacy, IT Future
SOA history in the utility industry cannot be understood without a full appreciation for the range of systems and software that industry IT shops must maintain. Utility and energy companies have a wide variety of services running on their IT systems. These services and platforms range from legacy mainframes, some of which are 20 to 30 years old, to supervisory control and data acquisition systems, which are practically unique to utilities. And there are a host of other applications: ERP, EAM systems, work management, outage management and more. In many cases, these technologies represent islands of information -- or silos -- as they are known in the popular IT lexicon. These silos present a need for a great deal of integration -- as they tend to rob IT organizations of the profit from SOA they might otherwise be able to enjoy.
IT departments within utility and energy companies have been using Web services for a considerable amount of time now. So there is not much about SOA and SOA history that is entirely unfamiliar to them. But using SOA as the overall architecture is a relatively new concept for these IT organizations.
As mentioned above, these organizations employ many disparate information systems. And there are reasons for this situation. Two main reasons are:
- Frequent mergers and acquisitions within the industry
- A dynamic regulatory environment featuring agencies that promulgate ever-changing reporting and communications requirements -- which are different from state to state and region to region
The utility industry, as it happens, is in the midst of a (rapid) evolutionary process which promises to have a profound impact on the IT departments of the firms involved: many utility and energy firms are moving from the (former) tightly regulated and asset-based return model to a new, partially competitive model. These changes are taking place sporadically in different parts of the country.
SOA History Replete with Hurdles for Utilities
During the course of SOA history, utilities gradually became victims of a "generational evolution" in information technology. They were fairly early adopters of the Internet in the early to mid 1990s. And, to a certain extent, in the 1990s, they began to employ the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems which other industries were using. Since then, utilities have done a great deal of interfacing between these systems, using a variety of different methods.
But the process of integration is far from complete. Utilities have experimented with portals and object orientation -- which are in use in many of their interfaces and systems -- but not on a comprehensive basis. A number of industry leaders have bought into enterprise application integration (EAI). However, these systems have tended to be proprietary. They have varied in their implementations.
The proprietary, "one-off" nature of many of these integration solutions has presented many utilities with significant challenges. This tutorial will examine some of these challenges as they have unfolded for utilities over the course of SOA history -- and present effective methods and solutions for dealing with them. The following chapters are included in this tutorial:
- Challenges posed by Proprietary SOA and the integration issues associated with the use of non-standards-based SOA
- What kinds of SOA Requirements and capabilities do utilities really need?
- Concrete SOA Advantages that demonstrate how SOA solves challenges plaguing the utilities and government
- How a registry helps with integration providing SOA Interoperability and many other benefits
- How combining a SOA registry with SOA management software increases visibility into the business, and why this matters.
- Using SOA Management to defeat application silos – i.e. how mapping, discovery, security and policy mechanisms, automation (and more) reduce SOA issues.
Stumbling Blocks in SOA History for the Utility Industry
Most utilities have grown up (beginning at a time that certainly pre-dates SOA history) to form tightly regulated and protected "business islands". Their information systems have tended to vary considerably -- from region to region, for example. And many of these systems were built exclusively for individual utilities, by the utilities themselves or by vendors who offered the kind one-off solutions alluded to above. The bottom line is that, in order for utilities to take advantage of the benefits of SOA, some things will have to change -- for starters, the industry's reliance on proprietary SOA.
For More Information
Want to learn more about how SOA can profit the energy & utility industry? Register to watch this free webinar today!
