Accenture on Thursday announced the launch of its Intelligent Network Data Enterprise, a data management platform intended to help utilities design, deploy and manage smart grids.
The company says its new platform lets utilities manage, integrate and analyze real-time data generated by all of the sources within a utility’s smart grid network.
The concept: turn all that data into insights, then action, then better performance, and ultimately, bottom-line savings.
The actual platform is made of a suite of software applications and management tools and is a reference architecture at its core. It can be configured for individual utilities.
Accenture’s three plays with the platform:
- As the software layer between raw data from the grid and the utility’s existing IT systems.
- As an integrating platform that unifies smart grid components such as communications, smart meters, intelligent network components and sensors.
- As a management tool to visualize and manage device components.
Accenture says a smart grid is expected to generate “up to eight orders of magnitude” more data than today’s existing power network.
More details on what the INDE incorporates:
- A smart grid blueprint methodology.
- A sensor network architecture for monitoring network performance, anticipating faults and improving reliability.
- An open, standards-based data acquisition, transport, event processing and storage architecture.
- Analytics capability for insights.
- A visualization platform that creates graphic representations of data.
The company said the platform was first deployed at Xcel Energy’s SmartGridCity, the world’s first fully-functional smart grid city, located in Boulder, Colorado. (SmartPlanet wrote about the project back in September 2009.)
Accenture said it also plans to offer an Oracle-based version of the INDE platform.
