SOA Advantages for the Utility Industry: Examples

There are many widely touted SOA advantages. But because utilities and energy companies must cope today with a burdensome array of SOA requirments including external business, regulatory and internal IT challenges, their IT departments are moving ahead slowly with service-oriented architectures (SOA). Utilities know they need systems that enable real business intelligence: systems that allow data to reach the managers' desks coalesced into information that enables them to make intelligent decisions. Otherwise, management -- as it often is -- is forced to grope in the dark without clear or up-to-date knowledge about the enterprise they are trying to steer.

Yet, for all the stumbling blocks in the utility and energy industry associated with implementing SOA, there have been examples of successful incremental integration approaches. In fact, among the most intriguing SOA advantages to many utility-industry IT shops is that it is possible (even advisable) to move ahead with integrating disparate systems in an incremental way.

SOA Advantages in Inter-State Mergers

In one particular case, a utility had merged with others -- and now had operations that spread across two states. Some systems in one of the legacy utilities in one state worked reasonably well; others didn't. The same was true in the other state. The problem is that the "working" systems didn't work together. In fact, the notion of having to integrate the systems is what drove the combined utility to look at SOA in the first place. Easy of integration, then, was the key driver -- it was first among the SOA advantages for this utility.

SOA advantages are not limited to ease of integration, however. Price can be an advantage, too. As utilities face integration concerns, they begin to realize that a SOA project doesn't have to be a $100-200-million idea. Instead, SOA can be implemented on an incremental basis -- at prices that utilities can generally afford. While IT organizations will invest strategically or tactically -- as they see the need -- they do not have the "megabucks" now to throw at technology that they had back when they were tightly regulated entities -- with guaranteed rates of return. While once there were many $100-200-million solutions "swallowed" by utilities, in many cases now those solutions are legacy systems which may never result in a reasonable return on the investments made.

Government and Other Examples of SOA Advantages

Another of the many SOA advantages is that it will finally move the utility industry toward truly open standards. SOA isn't generally a system bought from and installed by the vendor (although some solutions labeled as "SOA" do exist). But if utilities will look at SOA as a way of linking their disparate enterprise systems -- systems that are now employing closed integration methods -- then the technology can be made to address the business and economic needs and problems described earlier. Thus, SOA would seem to represent a generational leap ahead to link utilities (encompassing government-mandated, independent system operators down to Ercot in Texas).

Other industries have been moving much more rapidly than utilities in exploring and implementing SOA. And a number of governmental agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, have adopted SOA for the simple reason that it is a way to link systems to the disparate technologies of the FBI, the CIA and others.

SOA Advantages for Utilities: the Outlook for the Future

Utilities will continue to have to communicate with the Federal government, with their state governments, with their local governments, with the ISOs and with the independent power producers. And SOA is a way of doing that. At the same time, SOA can solve internal integration issues so that utilities can repair the longstanding generational problems that have hampered their decision-making processes.

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