OSIsoft Announces New Products for AMI and Smart Grid

OSIsoft, the industry standard in enterprise infrastructure for management of time series data and events, today announced the addition of two products for their Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Smart Grid initiatives: "PI Smart Connectors" and "PI Business Gateways".

OSIsoft has developed "Smart Connectors" that will interface metering systems (AMI) to the PI System in order to unify, validate, rationalize, store and synchronize the metering data at the speeds necessary to support next generation grid management applications. The PI System acts as a central meter data hub, capable of scaling up to store high fidelity information from tens of millions of meters received at hundreds of thousands of events per second. The real time analysis will shape these data into useable information for the next generation business applications presented as services, via PI Business Gateways. The prime user will be SAP's back office applications for the new enterprise customer support and asset management. In 2007, OSIsoft joined the SAP AMI Lighthouse Council, which is a consortium of vendors and utilities addressing business processes and use cases to support AMI to create the SAP for Utilities solution. While maintaining compatibility with this effort, OSIsoft will also offer a meter data unification and synchronization solution as part of our Business Gateway. These products will manage the tens of millions of meter readings and events, as well as real time analytics to interface AMI to billing and other back office systems.

- PI Smart Connectors interface AMI systems to the PI System. These Connectors automatically discover meters, configure the data points and collect data. They are designed to leverage templates that will allow mass changes to meter attributes and configurations, providing customers with the flexibility to change and rapidly create new business rules.

- PI Business Gateways receive, schedule and respond to service requests from EAM, CIS, CRM, OMS and other back office systems that require communication and data from the AMI systems. The PI Business Gateway is tightly coupled with PI Smart Connectors to provide fast, bi-directional communication between PI and the AMI head-end systems for functions such as connect/disconnect, last gasp, ping, on-demand reads, as well as price signals for demand response.

Benefits include:

- Integration of meter information into the end-to-end view of a utility from generation to the meter, in an event-oriented environment.

- PI High Availability (HA)—a fault tolerant mission critical environment that delivers split architecture security, interface failover, buffering, data replication and a service interface.

- PI AF—a template framework that supports simultaneous models (network connectivity, correlative, or process (CBM)) and meta-data store, making PI a cost-effective, real-time infrastructure that easily supports integration with all Smart Grid participants in an evolving industry.

- Easy integration with Geographic Information Systems, Power Modeling Applications and Outage Management Systems.

- A secure, robust, information infrastructure that stays in place while the systems it collects data from, or the systems it presents data to, evolve.

- Industry standard desktop and web environments, analytics, notifications and alarms already in common use in the industry.

- Standard capabilities that allow users to determine circuit profiles and feeder efficiencies, optimize load, evaluate grid and asset health—all in an actionable environment.

- Positioning for more advanced integration involving the interplay of market dynamics, distributed energy resources and smart homes.

"OSIsoft has been providing real-time event management, retrieval, and deep archiving of volumes of data for scalable management of relevant variables and events for our utility customers for over 25 years. We are very excited about adding AMI data management and the benefits this will bring for our customers. There are a lot of parallels between the SCADA data challenges of 20 years ago and AMI data today that we have already solved. OSIsoft continues to be committed to supplying reliable, highly available and secure software to our customers for their mission critical processes," said Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and Founder of OSIsoft.