Sunday 12 April 2009

Today’s Utility Information Technology

Today's utility IT calls for a change in perception, simple utility monitoring is just not enough, the existing inefficiencies requires a change, in today's global crisis both in economy and claimant there is a need for solutions that will proactively analyze, detect and react to real-time data produced by electric, gas, and water utilities. smart grids and real time data collection is the first step towards that change.

having all that data available makes you realize there is a lot of inefficiencies like producing electricity voltage even when it is unused at the moment, keeping the water pressure 24/7 while actually it is 50-60% utilized. think how much energy, pollution, costs can be saved if only we had the technology that could respond by analyzing massive data, detecting valuable information and reacting accordingly.

I ran across active insight which provides a real-time detection and reaction to online activities, they seem to focus on complex event processing for http. I realized that today utilities are able to transmit their current data over tcp and thus leverage active insight's capabilities to react.

Active insight's main technological edge is to process high data volume and detect behavioral patterns composed out of complex http streams, field validators, and time based activities. Their latest version added an async/sync service call capabilities which makes it easy to integrate enterprise systems like CRM / BI /  Billing in order to react upon detected behavior.

Whether it is a click stream (in web applications) or utility tcp data stream active insight provides a unique way to process that data in real-time, detect value based patterns and react accordingly, achieving 2 important goals: detecting value based patterns in real-time as appose to async batch data processing and secondly closing the loop once a pattern / transition is detected, in other words let the organization / people / systems know about it and do something about it.