The New World of Metering With their inscrutable wheels and dials, electricity, gas and water meters are the most recognizable “faces” of the utility industry. Today though, those meters are getting a face lift. Actually, they are being completely reengineered as regulators and consumers alike pressure utility industry companies to change the way they monitor and report electric, gas and water consumption, for reasons including environmental and efficiency concerns. The new monitoring systems will require integration with technology systems at the utility company and in the home, to enable better pricing models for the utility and better purchasing decisions for consumers. The meters will report their data automatically, delivering usage information to the utility via numerous communications channels. Regardless of how these new “smart” meters work, all the new systems will create a tremendous amount of data – an almost overwhelming torrent, as millions of meters report their unique information at minute-by-minute intervals. In fact, the data creation may become so profuse that the utility company’s IT department’s concerns about managing gigabytes and terabytes may soon be replaced by fears of dealing with petabytes, a quadrillion bytes, or 1,000 terabytes. Adding to the difficulty, utilities will need systems for separating automated meter data for various determinations within the utility, like billing and pricing. Truly, as advanced metering takes its place among the must-have technologies in the utilities planning, the coming data deluge will be like standing below a dam that’s about to breach. Enter Microsoft and Itron Microsoft and its partner Itron, a leading provider of metering, data collection and utility software solutions, have been working together to create technology systems that utilities will need to organize and make the most of the coming data flows. The resulting Itron Enterprise Edition (IEE) Meter Data Management (MDM) application is a highly scalable program that enables utilities to manage metering and other utility-operated data in one place, regardless of source Itron solutions are upstream utility applications that support an unlimited amount of Advanced Metering Infrastructure and Automated Meter Reading systems. They also support commercial and industrial (C&I) meters and improve operational efficiencies, customer service, distribution reliability and more. IEE MDM is a scalable, enterprise-wide, open-architecture data management solution that manages interval, register and event data in a central repository for residential and C&I customers looking to interface large amounts of data with multiple systems. Microsoft’s Role By working with Microsoft, Itron has the resources, experience and knowledge of an industry leader to ensure its solution delivers business results. In fact, in 2008, Itron successfully tested IEE MDM, compiling data from 4.5 million meters, every half-hour, or the equivalent of hourly data for nine million meters. The test imported over 200 million intervals of data and served to ensure that MDM meets the needs of large utility companies and can scale to the increasingly sophisticated advanced metering infrastructure solutions that are being introduced or piloted in programs across the industry. The tests used Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. Julie Hance, Itron’s Vice President of Software Services, summed it this way, “In all cases Microsoft and Itron were able to verify that Itron’s MDM solution does, in fact, meet and exceed all the required perfor- mance and scalability demands for data import necessary to satisfy large-scale installations upward of 9 million residential AMI hourly interval meters. Working together, Itron and Microsoft were able to establish that its architecture will flexibly scale to meet the future, growing needs of customers.” The IEE MDM application requires a number of other Microsoft technologies to run and is optimized for and supports the Microsoft Windows environment (a full list of Microsoft technologies is provided on the back page). Microsoft’s long-standing commitment to support the power and utilities industry is demonstrated by the fact that Microsoft solutions are present in most, if not all, utilities around the world – supplying desktop and office software, collaboration and communications solutions, as well as servers, databases, integration and management software – in some capacity. Microsoft and Itron: Enabling Utility Management of Meter Data Itron’s MDM solution uses the Microsoft platform to ensure that it is interoperable with a wide variety of systems to help people work across traditional data boundaries and gain streamlined access to information. Power & Utilities R e a d i n g s + C o n f i g u r a t i o n + E v e n t s C o n fi g u r a t i o n + E v e n t s + R e a d i n g s + C a l c u l a t i o n s Itron Enterprise Edition Meter Data Management Handheld Mobile Advanced Meter Reading MV-90 xi 3rd-Party Collection Systems Billing (CIS) Outage Management Analytical Applications Inventory and Asset Management Data Management is an Enterprise Affair