In an age of smart devices, energy consists of dull infrastructure: age-old meters, for one. As it turns out, the utilities industry wants to change all of that. The new industry vision, Smart Grid, will replace the old infrastructure with meters and communications devices that can broadcast outages, give residential users a daily, Web-based readout of their energy usage day by day, and radically simplify the way in which utility companies provision service.

SAP is part of the transformation. As enterprise applications provider of choice to many of the major utilities vendors, SAP is helping them change the infrastructure needed to deal with all the new data (for example, meters broadcasting usage statistics every fifteen minutes). As utilities reconfigure their systems and business processes, the participation of SAP and other vendors, including systems integrators and niche players in utilities data management, provides an example of how only vendors of a certain size can keep up with a big industry’s changes.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor