The IBM Solutions Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE)

Usually, our man Tom Raftery covers the green beat here at RedMonk (under the cleverly named “greenmonk” brand), but one of IBM’s labs here in Austin afforded me the chance to step in and do some green coverage. In this two part series on the IBM Solutions Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (or SAFE) I first get an overview from IBM’s Jeff Smith and then we walk through a demo of SAFE in action with Paul Williamson.

Over recent years, IBM has been expanding it’s customer base from the traditional IT department into other “industries,” as they call them. Instead of just selling their software, hardware, and services to IT, they’re looking to sell to others like, here, to the power and energy sector. See James discussion with IBM’s Karen Parrish for more on these Industry Solution Frameworks.

(Update, Dec 4th, 2009: I added a transcript for the interview portion.)

What is SAFE?

First, Jeff gives an overview and explanation of what IBM has to offer the energy and utility sector:

For even more context and background on IBM’s Industry Solutions, see the extended interview.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Well, hello everybody. Here we are in the Austin Solution Experience Lab at IBM. And this is Michael Coté with RedMonk and we’ve got a guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself?

?Jeff Smith: Sure, be happy to. My name is Jeff Smith and I’m the Vice President of the communication sector for the IBM Software Business. Another big part of IBM’s business overall besides being a technology supplier is being a supplier of knowledge through our consulting practice to mostly very industry specific kind of problem sets.

?So as it turns out we actually have a quite a bit of domain expertise in the energy and utilities space, which we are combining with our technology the platforms and foundations to help customers deliver those.

?Michael Coté: I’m curious, when it comes to energy what exactly is the energy industry?

?Jeff Smith: Sure, anything in the energy and utilities industry will start with an overall view or categorization of the problems that these energy and utilities companies are trying to solve. So they tend to break their business into three primary domains:

1. The generation of the utility or in the case of electricity we tend to go with power generation.

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2. The transmission and distribution of the utility this is where you get in to the whole notion of an intelligent utility network or in the case of electricity a smart grid.

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3. Then the way that the utility deals with their customers and suppliers and the whole customer iteration or customer operations part of their business.

?One of the fundamental starting points of the framework is to be able to go out in to the world and talk to the customers and partners in the context of the problems that they are trying to solve. So our framework is built around those three fundamental solution areas for energy and utility. [This is really the high-level point/goal of all of IBM’s Industry Frameworks/Solutions work –Coté]

?Michael Coté: Obviously, IBM has a lot that you guys are doing in this area, but I wonder — I mean you have some new initiatives coming out and I wonder how those connect and sort of ground all of this stuff like the SAFE initiative, for example, if it’s technology?

?Jeff Smith: So if you look at what the fundamental problems are that addresses we started getting in to this earlier but the areas of generation and distribution and the whole notion of the interaction with your customers.

?So let’s talk about middle section, because it’s really rare — frankly most of the early action is and that is the notion of what we call an Intelligent Utility Network. We purposely generalize that term as opposed to saying Smart Grid because Smart Grid tends to refer to a power grid that limits you in to this world of electricity.

?Michael Coté: Right, right.

?Jeff Smith: But the fact is that water as a utility is critical and it will be increasingly require intelligent distribution and management of the flow of water and gas is certainly one that is already that way in addition to electricity. So electricity tends to be what you think of when you say grid.

?Let’s start with the notion of an advanced meter. Just about everybody is starting their march down a Smart Grid with a notion of installing an advanced or an intelligent meter.

?Really what this is, is a meter that can gather a lot of information about what’s going on in the realm that it can see and communicate in a two-way fashion with not only the items in the realm that it can see that are consuming the power, but also the utility that’s controlling the power in way that either causes intelligent things to happen in the facility or that gathers a lot of information, brings it back to the central location and then they can do something smart with it.

?In the beginning the whole notion of an intelligent meter was to allow you to turn service on and off without having to do a truck roll and send a guy out there or a person out there to turn it on or not have to send somebody out there to read it, so you can tell how much power that the company was using.

?Increasingly the intelligent meter will play a central role in and the actual optimization of the entire flow and so most people are starting with this notion of an intelligent meter. If you look at how this section of our framework we point out the technologies in the IBM product portfolio that would be involved in that example. So we call advance metering a —

?Michael Coté: Sort of the mapping of the technologies you have to the scenarios that you’re talking with and actually doing — the software that actually does all of this?

?Jeff Smith: The software that does the work, and the good news for us is that we recognize that this is something that we need to do and want to do with other key partners that provide part of the capabilities for that entire story and so SAFE as a framework is not only a collection of technologies that enable this let’s say advanced metering management, but also an ISV can interface with or leverage to help bring that total picture to the customer.

?[Here, Jeff speaks to some of the new functionality you’d get –Coté] Well, IBM is not in the meter business. We are for sure the business of the software, which would instrument the meter like actually — perhaps a piece of software that might sit inside a meter or in some kind of a collection point in a neighborhood were lots of meters are talking to it and doing an intelligent job of correlating all the information that comes from that meter – categorizing it, sending it back to central facilities, housing it, storing it and then allowing you to do trend analysis or predictive analysis on that and then ultimately feeding the notion of using that information for optimization.

?Michael Coté: Seems like that there must be some sort of original content that gets mixed into that that specializes it down for the [energy] industry.

?Jeff Smith: Absolutely correct, and so the original content we call it industry-specific assets. But the industry-specific assets that come with it can come in a couple of different forms.

?In some cases it’s actually part of the product portfolio, but in an extension or some kind of a feature or a capability that you can buy along with the software that is specifically targeted at and leave you a problem or in some cases it’s an asset, which we offer along with the product that either the customer themselves or perhaps some kind of an integrator that they would hire whether it’s IBM or not and would use to actually – methodologies, best practices, things that they would use to implement the solution even though it’s not part of the licensed product.

?What are the other things that we didn’t talk about — that SAFE is built on the premise that the most effective way for us to implement these intelligent utility networks in the long-term is built around a set of industry standards.

?Standards for how the pieces interact with each other, standards for how the data is constructed or brought back and analyzed etcetera.

?So the reality of the world today is that there are some of these standards that exist, a lot of the work really being leveraged. There’s a lot of legacy equipment out there and interfaces out there, but we have a vision of a set of standards that we all agree need to be leveraged.

?So SAFE is built on the premise of being able to get the ultimate result through the use of these standards, but kind of meet the systems where they are today and start off with interfaces to whatever kind of elements —

?In general what’s the benefit of standards to anybody? I mean standards enable maximum flexibility and interoperability, which ultimately the most benefits the customer who gets to buy pieces of things that fit together therefore they don’t feel like they have to go get everything from one supplier and sort of locked in to their specific portfolio.

?So standards enable the maximum amount of interoperability and therefore flexibility both technical and vendor flexibility for the customers and the partners in the ecosystem.

?The world of the smart grid is going to every bit as heterogeneous as a data center in the back office of a bank. I mean it’s just the reality of the way the world works, and so standards are mandatory for that and standards give you the kind of flexibility and interoperability that is going to be required to make this work.

?Michael Coté: I appreciate you spending all this time to talk with us.

?Jeff Smith: Okay.

?Michael Coté: Thanks a lot.

?Jeff Smith: Thanks for having me.

SAFE in Action

Second, Paul Williamson walks us through a pretty detailed, but quick demonstration of the how the different components of SAFE are used to address one type of problem, a power outage:

It was especially nice to finally film something in IBM’s Solution Experience Lab above. You can tell there’s a lot of excellent demo-juice going on in there. I need to get my hands on that RFID printer.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored the videos above.