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Data opportunity 'enormous' for energy sector: ElectraNet

Data opportunity 'enormous' for energy sector: ElectraNet

Electricity transmission provider streamlines IT, prepares for future

ElectraNet senior IT manager Graham Smith (far left) joined other APJ customers at a Dell session hosted by the region's Dell president, Amit Midha (far right).

ElectraNet senior IT manager Graham Smith (far left) joined other APJ customers at a Dell session hosted by the region's Dell president, Amit Midha (far right).

Rationalisation and virtualisation

Over the past two years, Smith has purchased mostly Dell infrastructure.

“The intent with using Dell as much as possible – whilst of course still maintaining some commercial pressure to keep [Dell] honest – is for us to minimise the overhead, maximise the value [and] minimise the re-education effort that we have to go through every time that [we] bring a new partner, new vendor or a new integrator into the space.”

Having a single point of accountability is a major benefit, he said.

“You often hear the expression, ‘one throat to choke’,” Smith said. “We prefer, ‘one back to slap’.”

ElectraNet is moving the management platform it uses to monitor and control the electricity network from physical infrastructure onto Dell virtual infrastructure.

“That’s a very important step for us in simplifying, de-risking and reducing the cost of future upgrades to that platform,” said Smith.

The system has very high availability requirements, and it had been difficult to perform upgrades under the previous, physical approach, he said.

“The cost of the regression testing whenever you upgrade that energy management platform, because of its mission criticality, is enormous. The easier we can make that ongoing takes a lot of recurrent cost out of our business.”

Smith said an initial hurdle in making the change was convincing the staff that use the monitoring system. “They hate change of any kind.”

However, because the virtualisation does not create much visible change for the operators and because their manager understands the reasons for it, it has been easier to move this change through, he said.

The monitoring system will stay on premise, Smith said. He noted that the electric industry has long favoured cap-ex and owned assets, so “any move to off-premise models that are op-ex funded is a change-management challenge.”

A changing industry

Smith predicted an array of additional IT challenges and opportunities ahead for the electricity industry.

"Our industry in Australia is potentially going to become much more competitive, whereas in the past it’s been quite a cooperative industry with a lot of information sharing.”

“I’m keenly interested in what that means for our security posture, for our management of information leakage out of the organisation and all of the security implications that come out of that.”

There’s changes ahead for how the business operates, too, said Smith.

“Agility will be much more important for our business moving forward,” he said.

That will include “looking at how we make our infrastructure more flexible to different demands, how we can allow people to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device, [and] how we move workflows around to ensure the right level of performance, availability and scalability.”

And ElectraNet might soon have to think about social media for the first time, he said.

The Australian electricity regular has been pushing electric companies to demonstrate they are engaging with customers.

“At the moment our business does not have any social media presence or do any social media analysis. Depending on what model we choose to go with that consumer engagement piece, that could change dramatically.”

Adam Bender travelled to Singapore as a guest of Dell.

Adam covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam

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Tags vendor relationshipssocial mediaenergyDellvirtualisationCase StudyelectricityElectraNet

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