Microsoft Power and Utilities Blog

It’s Time for the Next Wave

2013-05-09T05:59:25Z

Microsoft has just published the Smart Energy Reference Architecture SERA v2.0, after many months of diligent work on the part of architects, partners and Microsoft engineers combined. The document has grown slightly from the SERA version 1.0 length of 130 pages: SERA v2.0 is now 255 pages. The principle of addressing industry challenges first and then discussing how the Microsoft stack can be used to address those challenges is maintained in the new version, with the first 163 pages being technology agnostic. One industry analyst, Jesse Berst, describes SERA v2.0 as: What every utility can learn from Microsoft and we would encourage you to read the analysis..

Some of the new content was driven by the rapid advances in Microsoft technologies and new solution offerings. This includes many new relevant products, not the least of which are Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure, SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Windows Phone 8 and Dynamics. The technology advances are truly profound and can significantly change the way Utilities do business.

However, the majority of the content has been driven by the SERA Advisory Council which is a working group composed of partners and customers. The Foundational Pillars and the Advisory Council’s areas of focus resulting in the New Developments in SERA 2.0 are in the graphic at the right. Not to repeat the document here, these topics are front and center to virtually every Utility today and SERA provides relevant guidance for how to think about and address each.

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to our partners and customers who labored through multiple reviews and contributed much of the content. We would not have been able to produce this quality document without their help. - Larry Cochrane

Cloud Produces $1 Billion for Microsoft

2013-05-02T19:19:39Z

We couldn’t help but beam brightly when we saw this headline the other day in the Seattle Times: “Windows Azure now one of Microsoft’s billion-dollar businesses.” Here’s the summary:

It’s a big deal at Microsoft when one of its products or services joins its billion-dollar club, the ones that bring in a billion dollars or more of revenue a year.

The latest to join that club: the Windows Azure cloud platform, which launched in 2010. Curt Anderson, chief financial officer of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, told Bloomberg News that annual sales of Windows Azure software and related software programs have now surpassed $1 billion.

Moreover, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. is quoted in the article as saying “I expect [revenues from the cloud for Microsoft] to double annually.”

We are excited both about our company achieving this milestone and also having a future that looks so bright for the utility sector.

As we’ve mentioned before and demonstrated with some select case studies, we believe cloud computing represents a unique opportunity for utilities in the Big Data era. They have the opportunity to save money and resources in many different ways using cloud computing in different ways across their operations. We know that some utilities have reservations about sending all their computing systems up to the cloud and we think they are right to have those cautions. But nonetheless, there are countless opportunities to benefit from small cloud engagements, in their many different forms.

In fact, one of the benefits of getting our newest version of the Smart Energy Reference Architecture is to see the expanded sections on cloud computing for utilities. Take a look and I think you’ll see why we’re confident the Forrester analyst’s prediction will come true. Utilities and many other companies in many other industries will see the benefits of the cloud each new day. We’re happy to help. – Jon C. Arnold

Webcast: Use of Gaming Technology and 3D Humans to Manage Worker Exposure to Radiation at Nuclear Plants

2013-04-21T13:13:48Z

We have written before about the Kinect effect and how it is spurring innovation in industry and specifically how Kinect adds to utility health and safety record performances in nuclear facilities with our partner Siemens.

We would like to invite everyone to join us for a free webcast on Wednesday, April 24^th at 11AM eastern time, presented by Siemens and Microsoft on the “Use of Gaming Technology and 3D Humans to Manage Worker Exposure to Radiation at Nuclear Plants”. The webcast will be recorded and available for those that cannot attend the live session.

As background, Utility workers at nuclear facilities are exposed to radiation that must be kept below certain levels to be considered safe. ALARA, an acronym for “As Low As Reasonable Achievable,” is a principle set forth by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that gives employers an absolute duty to ensure the safety and health of workers in every aspect related to the work in radioactive environments.

During this webcast Siemens PLM Software and Microsoft will examine the unique challenges utilities face when training for and planning ALARA human work processes. A special guest speaker from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) will talk about the ground breaking work they did to create an algorithm to estimate radiological dosage in nuclear plants. Siemens PLM Software and Microsoft will discuss commercial off the shelf software available today to help utilities improve employee health and safety programs by utilizing advanced IT tools for ALARA planning, while also improving work efficiency in the plant. Demonstrations will include Siemens PLM Software’s work planning application Tecnomatix with “Jack and Jill”, the virtual humans and the Kinect for Windows system.

This is a great example of innovation in industry and we hope you can join us! – Jon C. Arnold

Leveraging the Cloud Takes IT Support to the Post-Nick Burns Era

2013-04-17T01:41:47Z

Most information age workers have had an experience worth telling about their company’s on-site technology support guru. And most experiences are about the petty tyrannies the support guy leverages over his co-workers, or the small non-monetary favors (like lunch at the local steakhouse) they require to keep the computer system running. Have you ever seen the Saturday Night Live skit about “Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy”? If not, it’s worth a look, here.

But ole Nick has met his comeuppance with the advent of cloud computing, as the delivery of IT services has moved to on-demand models.

Take for example the recent announcement that Mainstream Renewable Power has contracted with Auxilion to provide its Virtual Service Desk to all its employees and affiliates across five continents. MRP designs and operates renewable power installations around the world, so it needs robust IT-support systems to keep the turbines turning, so to say. It’s choosing Auxilion to create a virtual agent – colloquially called the IT Guy – is a major move, and their strategy to keep MRP an all-Microsoft shop continues. Auxilion is a Microsoft cloud technology provider.

As MRP says in the press release:

"We are experiencing exponential business growth and realised that traditional on-premise, localised and multi-vendor approaches to IT support simply aren't scalable," commented John Shaw, CIO at Mainstream. "With end-to-end global IT support services from one partner, our Information Services team focus on priority IT improvement projects, safe in the knowledge our employees and affiliates are well supported at all times."

And that’s yet another great thing about the cloud: Nick Burns can put away his passport. – Jon C. Arnold

How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future

2013-04-15T18:37:45Z

Helping to modernize the world’s infrastructure has been a key focus for us at Microsoft. Whether it’s power & utilities, manufacturing or cities we are working to provide innovative solutions that look beyond the status quo and provide new thinking to help solve many of the world’s complex problems.

We like to practice what we preach here at Microsoft and a great example is the work that Darrell Smith, our director of facilities and energy, is doing to create a remarkable smart campus. Darrel assembled a small team of engineers that cast aside suggestions that we spend US$60 million to turn our 500-acre headquarters into a smart campus to achieve energy savings and other efficiency gains. Instead, he applied the “Internet of Things meets Big Data” approach to create a data-driven software solution that is slashing the cost of operating our campus of 125 buildings. The software, which is saving us millions of dollars, has been so successful that we and our partners are now helping building managers across the world deploy the same solution. With commercial buildings consuming an estimated 40 percent of the world’s total energy, the potential is huge.

It’s an amazing story that continues to unfold and definitely worth a read. Enjoy the full story here! – Jon C. Arnold

Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Trend Continues in Worldwide Industry: ABB Looks to the Cloud

2013-04-10T18:12:32Z

Utilities and utility services companies around the world continue to recognize the value of knowledge and information as dynamos to corporate activity. Harnessing the knowledge of workers and enabling them to collaborate – wherever they are located – allows them to create more robust products and services that truly advance innovation and progress.

But utilities have known that the obstacles to greater collaboration is partly a technology problem and partly a people/process/culture problem. Good, intuitive, secure technology must be in place, and the corporate leadership must encourage its use among all its employees, changing their work habits to produce more for everyone. More and more companies are advancing this trend.

Today, there is yet more evidence of the uptake of collaboration and knowledge sharing in the announcement that ABB will deploy Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer for its 145,000 employees in 100 countries.

ABB’s use of Office 365 will transition their employees from multiple IT collaboration and messaging solutions to Office 365, our cloud-based platform for productivity, communication, collaboration and enterprise social media. Yammer is Microsoft’s private social network for companies, allowing their employees to collaborate securely across departments, geographies, and content and business applications.

ABB will likely use Office 365 to simplify their online meetings, possibly reducing travel costs by 15-20 percent. Yammer’s discussion groups will greatly accelerate problem-solving among groups working in different geographies on the same equipment, experiencing the same problems.

It’s an exciting day, a tribute to the vision of integrated corporate activity for increasing efficiency in industry. – Jon C. Arnold

How Windows Azure is Helping Manage Solar Energy Generation in Japan

2013-04-09T19:24:28Z

Continuing our series of postings on how the cloud is gaining momentum is in Power & Utilities, there is an excellent story posted today by our Environmental Sustainability Team. The story is about the new Iwami Higashi Solar Power Station which is part of Japan’s shift toward renewables following the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The facility is using a power generation management system is built on the Windows Azure platform and went into production in March. By using a cloud-based system, the power station’s performance can be monitored remotely to ensure that the power station’s generation capacity is used as effectively as possible. It’s a fascinating story and I would highly recommend spending a few minutes reading it here. – Jon C. Arnold

Schneider Electric unveils their cloud based “Orbit” mobile inspection solution

2013-04-05T14:59:03Z

We have written numerous times in this blog on how Microsoft partners are releasing Cloud based applications that can help Utilities reduce costs and increase productivity. Couple this with our last blog where Zpryme Forecasts Cloud Future for Utilities and you can see an undeniable trend that is further exemplified by Schneider Electric’s unveiling of their Azure based “Orbit” mobile inspection offering at their Link user’s conference.

The interest in this SaaS solution was staggering. The sessions were standing room only when this next generation mobile platform for utilities and telecommunications providers was outlined. Orbit allows field crews to know where to go, what to do, and what information to gather. The results of their work is reported back in real time, so coordinators can have better information about what’s happening out there. Utilities who need to gather critical information about their infrastructure will benefit from not having to purchase and manage an on premise infrastructure.

Pole inspections, substation inspections, leak detections, storm damage assessments, and just about any inspection application you can think of can be quickly set up and deployed. While this service model offers the ability to scale up and down on demand, the model also allows Schneider Electric to rapidly deploy enhancements and new capabilities, not to mention a lower total cost of ownership. Failover, backup and recovery are included along with federated security and role-based access. It’s a single sign-on solution. And with the hybrid environment, your GIS data will remain on premise. On the mobile end, Schneider Electric will facilitate the use of numerous devices including Windows 7 and Windows 8 based tablets and hardened laptops. Mobile users can be completely offline. Leveraging Azure, if your internal network goes down, field crews can continue working. If outside communication is severed, field crews can continue working. All in all, it was very exciting to see the high level of interest. We are looking forward to seeing this offering commercially release and in action very soon. – Larry Kuhl

Zpryme Forecasts Cloud Future for Utilities; Microsoft’s Flexibility Stands Ready

2013-04-04T18:44:03Z

Following on our recent blog about our hesitation years ago to introduce the “Utility in the Cloud” concept, we saw recently a report from Zpryme that forecasts a cloud-laden future.

What’s interesting about their research is that it independently substantiates the view we’ve had for years, namely that utilities are undergoing tremendous transformation due to the necessity of enabling a smart grid and adapting to the new smart energy ecosystem that’s imminent, with distributed generation, renewables, consumerization of IT, etc.

The Zpryme research findings mirror our conclusion: that cloud solutions are the most capable technology for securely and flexibly managing the data at scale from the AMI and sensor deployments of recent years. And Zpryme concludes as we do, that cloud-based systems are indeed necessary to increasing utilities ability to rapidly scale solutions for optimization and changing business models – no matter where the utility is located.

In their report, Zpryme says:

Our forecast indicates the market for cloud solutions for utilities will experience dynamic growth over the next 8-10 years, with an average annual growth rate of 25%. Growth will be moderate in the short-term, primarily led by North America and Europe, and accelerate later by Asia Pacific, which has been slower to adopt cloud services. However, by 2015 Asia Pacific will surpass Europe, and will do the same for North America in 2019, and by 2020 will account for the largest share of the global cloud services market. The major application areas for cloud solutions will be in distribution system software and applications, AMI, and data management and analytics.

So why is this important?

Well, to us it forewarns the utility industry that many new companies will come to them with fancy offerings and big promises. We encourage utilities to continue their diligence in selecting their vendors, as there are smart ecosystems of software solution providers that have already been vetted over years of success. That system I’m speaking about is the Microsoft ecosystem of partners, the one which we were also talking about in that same post mentioned earlier, the one which is increasingly trusted as preferred vendors of choice. A large component of that trust is based on our enabling flexibility and integration in all our solutions.

Consider for example, Microsoft’s ability to provide multiple approaches to cloud services:

We believe that cloud services will continue to drive the overall cost of information technology lower and enable completely new classes of applications and solutions, largely because of service delivery through multiple formats. Think of the cloud applications that would be appropriate to mobile users, or those for generation fleets. Often, an IT department will start with transition from on-premise to a private cloud environment and perhaps focus on deploying virtual servers. This is commonly referred to as “Infrastructure as a service” and represents one of the flavors of IT as a service that is available within the world of cloud computing. But this is but one example of the possible cloud models, and IT professionals should become familiar with a variety of cloud standards so that they can select appropriately based on the needs of the enterprise. For example, we prefer to divide cloud computing into three categories and four deployment systems:

Categories

· Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which provides hardware for storage, servers and network and resource provisioning to support flexible ways to create, use and manage virtual machines (VMs).

· Platform as a service (PaaS), focused on providing the higher-level capabilities — more than just VMs — required to support applications.

· Software as a service (SaaS), the applications that provide business value for users.

Systems

• On-Premise. Most conventional, especially for Energy Management Systems and other core Mission Critical Operations systems.

• Private Clouds. Virtualization, resource pooling and resource consolidation create on-premise Private Clouds, or hosted Private Clouds at cloud service providers.

• Hybrid Cloud. Combines elements of the other cloud models but keeps sensitive data or Mission Critical processing behind the Utilities’ on-premise firewall.

• Public Cloud. Either dedicated, servicing only one customer, or multitenant.

For utilities that embrace their future in the cloud, they will want a partner that’s experienced with the technology challenges and benefits of each of the above. Microsoft is the only vendor that has a holistic offering providing the flexibility to move across all these options with deployment location being as simple as a configuration detail. May the cloud be with you! Jon C. Arnold

Bill Gates Paraphrases Mark Twain’s “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

2013-03-27T14:39:03Z

It seems to us that Microsoft is a favorite target of many in the media and the software industry. I think our company was predicted to go out of business long ago, early in the history of personal computing.

Nonetheless, we’re still here and continuing to grow, despite the naysayers. A recent contributor to “Seeking Alpha” summarized this nicely in his article, “If you think Microsoft is dying, you need a reality check.” In the article, author Gregory Vousvounis addresses 9 of the current “Microsoft is doomed” scenarios, and I encourage you to read Vousvounis’ take on how the assertions don’t measure up. We most enjoyed his last point:

In a recent interview (watch after the 44:15 mark) Bill Gates talks about Microsoft and reminds people that Microsoft is a software company. He specifically said in reference to Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung:

"[...] none of them understands software that deals with complex information like Microsoft does."

He also emphasized that the "magic of the future" lies in services like visual and speech recognition and other cloud based services that are software-centric and play on Microsoft's strengths. He specifically described a future when we will do almost everything in the cloud. In that future the key elements are software and user interface, where he believes Microsoft has a great advantage over the competition.

Microsoft is a great company because it keeps itself looking forward. In the utility context, the cloud is the most important innovating and capability-enhancing technology this industry has ever seen. We have our eye on the cloud, for you, no matter what you hear among the chattering class. And we are the best at what we can do for you in that area.

So to paraphrase the famous American writer Mark Twain, reports of Microsoft’s demise are greatly exaggerated. – Jon C. Arnold