News | August 4, 2008

Ecologic Analytics Announces SOA-Based Interface For Silver Spring Networks

Minneapolis, MN - Ecologic Analytics, a leading provider of meter data management systems (MDMS) and decision management technologies for electric, natural gas and water utilities, announced recently that the new AMI interface (i.e. gateway) for Silver Spring Networks' latest version of Utility IQ has received deployment certification from the Ecologic Integration Lab.

Designed to support large deployments, this new multi-threaded gateway enables the Ecologic MDMS to provision the Utility IQ meters as well as receive reads and event data from them. The Ecologic Integration Lab certified the gateway for Utility IQ using eight real-world scenarios to simulate the typical meter lifecycle:

  • Meter Install
  • Meter Update
  • Premise Update
  • Meter Read
  • Meter Remove
  • Meter Exchange
  • Set Administrative State
  • Event Processing

Across a service territory, these eight meter lifecycle stages are in a continuous state of change. The new gateway for Utility IQ allows utilities to propagate changes to meter configurations and validate reads continuously, keeping usage measurement closely aligned with billing requirements in a near real-time fashion.

"To help utilities take advantage of new AMI features as they become available, we manage the integration with providers like Silver Spring Networks," said David Hubbard, co-founder and chief technology officer for Ecologic Analytics. "The near real-time data streams flowing between the MDMS and the AMI system provide us with an opportunity to process data more efficiently."

Later this year, Ecologic Analytics plans to enable more functionality through the Silver Spring Networks gateway. Integration to support advanced functionalities such as outage and restoration event management, on-demand meter reads, power status checks, remote connect/disconnect and other command and control capabilities will be completed.

The complementary service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategies of Silver Spring Networks and Ecologic Analytics allows utilities to take advantage of streaming AMI data that enables faster access to the data than using traditional periodic file transfer methods. Processing the raw data as it arrives can reduce the time required to complete load, validation, estimation and editing routines. The combination of getting reads as they are available and processing them immediately can enable actionable information to be published to subscribing systems such as billing and outage management in record time.

"We are happy to have integrated our solution with the Ecologic MDMS," said Don Reeves, vice president of Software Engineering for Silver Spring Networks. "Their system can integrate via SOA and streaming interfaces. This, combined with the scalability of their system, makes it conducive for managing the volume of near-real-time data that our solution can provide."

Interoperability with Utility IQ is part of Ecologic Analytics' broader SOA strategy. The company continues to expose Web services for the major integration points to the AMI technology providers and utility systems for billing, customer service, outage management and more.

Integration with the Utility IQ is available with the current version of the Ecologic MDMS. For more information, send an e-mail to contact@ecologicanalytics.com.

SOURCE: Ecologic Analytics