Smart stuff...

As it happened I was in IBM seminar yesterday that covered cloud computing and the future of service delivery as IBM sees it. No new ground breaking stuff, more of a reiteration of what people-in-the-know already know. Plus a couple of case studies and an external view. All in all a good day. After the event I found myself chatting with some of the IBM guys on the topic of smart systems and IBM's Smarter Planet initiative. Today I am reading about how Oracle Utilities is telling the utilities providers they (utilities, of course!) are not ready for the smart grid. All the talk from the utilities suppliers of how they are going to provide smart and accurate metering... and now this. As it turns out "/.../42 percent of the respondents said they had fully integrated their meter data management systems with customer care and billing, 50 percent with self service applications and 36 percent with asset management. Thirty-two percent have also fully integrated network management with their meter data management system." Now how good is that!? We are talking of 50 utilities providers in EMEA region who are implementing their smart grid systems. They should have infrastructure in place, so I can't see where the problem lies. Lack of investment? Willingness to help the customers?

One good point made by one of the IBM guys was his experience with one of the UK utilities company, that had set out to equip their meters with RFID to enable remote metering. Good idea? Yes, if the data is sent to the data centre, not collected by the engineers roaming around the country... as that was the initial idea. Bad!

Let's just hope by the time the utility players start rolling (pushing) out smart meters (to be re/charged to the customers), there is a sound infrastructure in place to support it.