Articles
SOA: Coming to a Utility Near You?
AMRA News, June 03, 2006 by Betsy Loeff
Analysts at Gartner, Inc. the world's largest information technology research company, predict that service oriented architecture or SOA will be a prevailing software development practice by 2008. And, while you might not see SOA being used in your utility’s data center yet, service-oriented changes may be on the way in the future.
Advanced metering infrastructure or AMI is a key driver for SOA’s migration into the utility IT shop, some industry sources say. That’s because AMI’s data collection capabilities and system integration issues could make SOA the cost-effective alternative to traditional integration and application-development methods.
At Your Service
Wikipedia, an online, user-generated encyclopedia, defines SOA as a “style of enterprise architecture that enables the creation of applications that are built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services,” or units of work within a computer application. According to the Wikipedia definition, “Services are self-contained, reusable software modules with well-defined interfaces that are independent of applications and the computing platform on which they run.”
Dr. Hao He, a Ph.D. in quantum optics and chief technology officer of SoftTouch Information Technology, compares IT services to the operations of a compact disk player. “You can play the same CD on a portable player or on your expensive stereo,” he writes in an article entitled, What is Service-Oriented Architecture? “Both offer the same CD-playing service.”
He goes on to say, “The idea of SOA departs significantly from that of object-oriented programming, which strongly suggests that you should bind data and its processing together. In object-oriented programming style, every CD would come with its own player.” That’s not the case with SOA. Under this architecture, applications can reuse services from other applications.
How can services work together? A little SOAP – which stands for simple object access protocol – helps. Travis Rouillard, Need Title, at Utility Integration Solutions considers SOAP almost synonymous with SOA. Through SOAP, one program or application can communicate with another via hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and its Extensible Markup Language (XML). This allows computers to grab services from one application to the next, regardless of whether that process is occurring over the Internet or via a company’s internal network.
“SOA provides a sort of ‘lingua franca’ to allow applications to talk to each other,” Rouillard adds. “Where SOA impacts application development is that you design your application so that it can talk with other applications” and pull units of work into the program as needed. “Instead of consolidating all the functionality into one application, you build the app so that if it needs customer data, for instance, it just goes to the Customer Information System and gets the customer data,” Rouillard continues. “It doesn’t need to store all the data itself or repeat functionality that the CIS already provides.”
The ability to reuse services from one application to the next is one reason IT experts at San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric are integrating SOA into their system design as they move forward with advanced metering. According to Belvin Louie, solutions architect for PG&E’s AMI project, application developers at his utility will strive to take a “strategic view of services being provided by different systems and determine whether those services can be used or replicated for different applications” going forward.
As an example, Louie says a call to a meter-reading system could be a service made available to a number of different applications. “That way, each application doesn’t have to build that particular module every time” it needs to perform the work.
Of course, operating this way takes integration, and SOA is a good method of integrating systems, says Ken Hamilton, director of product development at LODESTAR Corporation, a supplier of energy solutions. Noting that the cost of integration can be quite high, Hamilton adds that, for utilities, “SOA is a way of managing costs.”
According to Gartner researchers, each dollar’s worth of software licensed today chalks up $5 or more in implementation costs. Advances in web services could halve that expense, possibly bringing installation costs down to $2.50 or less per dollar spent on a software license.
PG&E’s Louie adds that much of his organization’s systems integration work, which is being done in large part by WACS, LLC, “uses principles of SOA.” Experts agree: For utilities implementing AMI, SOA facilitates integration, including the integration of legacy mainframe systems, with other applications.
All Together Now
“Flexible” isn’t necessarily a word used to describe today’s IT systems. According to Chris King, Chief Strategy Officer of eMeter, an MDM provider, utilities are often “tied to old application software” because they’ve customized it, and they can’t simply “drop in newer versions from Microsoft or Oracle.”
Rouillard adds, “Historically, utilities have used point-to-point, batch integration” that transferred data from one application to the next in rigid formats at specific times.” According to him, SOA is more of an integration architecture than an application development architecture. As an alternative to point-to-point, batch integration, he says SOA is “less expensive and less proprietary than the most obvious alternative, which is EAI” – enterprise application integration – a form of middleware that has been in use for more than a decade. Rouillard maintains that if utilities follow patterns seen in other industries, SOA could cut system maintenance and integration costs by 20 percent to 40 percent.
No wonder LODESTAR’s Hamilton sees SOA as the next step in evolution from EAI. Acknowledging that EAIs are proprietary, Hamilton claims that SOA has the advantage of being standards based. “Most IT professionals use XML as the format for transferring data,” he says.
Because of SOA’s “more standardized interfaces,” eMeter’s King says, “Applications can be upgraded more easily without affecting other applications.”
King views IT systems with seasoned realism: “Over time, you’ll need to upgrade or replace things anyway. The idea behind SOA is that when you need to replace things, it will be easier and cheaper.” He adds that SOA is a means of planning for change, but that it also “extends the life and value of existing utility systems by making it easier for new systems to work with old ones.”
At JEA, the municipal electric and water utility in Jacksonville, Fla., Wanyonyi Kendrick, the utility’s chief information officer says her department’s goal for SOA “would be to increase customer satisfaction by decreasing the complexity of integration and increasing the time-to-market of new IT solutions.”
LODESTAR’s Hamilton cites yet another advantage of SOA: “It is event, not batch, driven,” he say. Under batch-driven systems, meter data isn’t available to applications until the batch has been run. At utilities without fixed-network meter reading, this doesn’t happen until all the meter readers have downloaded the readings they’ve gathered with mobile collection units or handheld computers.
AMI, in contrast, can gather meter data throughout the day or even on-demand by customer service representatives, outage restoration workers and others throughout the utility with authorization to grab and use the information. The request for data becomes the event that retrieves the data. This, in turn, makes SOA a logical choice for building applications that span several utility functions and departments.
Mix and Match
“SOA delivers a modular approach, where smaller units of work can be encapsulated as a web service, coupled together and rolled into an automated business process,” Hamilton points out.
Rouillard cites outage management as one activity that could integrate several systems. For example, he says, getting the lights back on requires utilities to “coordinate between SCADA, meter reading, CIS, the call center and work management systems.” With SOA, utility mangers could build a process that can automatically detect the outage, query meters to figure out who is affected, notify the call center for customer care and simultaneously route details of the problem to the work management group so that field engineers can be dispatched for repairs.
To make such multi-systems work optimally within an SOA, King says, an “enterprise service bus” might be a logical addition to any SOA-based system. According to him, an enterprise service bus “is software that moves data between systems in a standardized fashion.” The term “bus,” he says, harkens back to the notion of an electrical bus, which Wikipedia defines as “a physical electrical interface where many devices share the same electric connection. This allows signals to be transferred between devices, allowing information to be shared.”
Another way to view it, King adds, is to think of an old-fashioned party line, where everyone was supposed to listen for their own particular ring before picking up the phone. “The AMR system takes in the reads and publishes them on the bus. Then the validation application listens to the bus, sees raw data and validates it. Other applications also are listening, but they would likely be listening for validated data to use,” he says.
With this type of integration at work, King states that over time, utilities can pull together an “entire IT ecosystem” where applications “live” and interact harmoniously.
Not surprisingly, JEA’s IT chief, Kendrick, says her utility is focusing first on getting their meter data management system in place, and she expects “SOA’s value will grow over the years.”
Along with PG&E and JEA, other utilities starting down the SOA path include TXU Electric Delivery in Dallas and San Diego Gas and Electric. With projects still in their initial phases, managers at the latter two utilities opted not to be interviewed for this story. Rouillard works with San Diego, and he maintains the utility’s managers are “trying to use the most modern, cost effective approach available today. Based on the current landscape, that’s SOA.”
Rouillard adds that utilities are just starting “forays into SOA,” even though the technology has been used for years in some industries, such as banking and Internet companies. “AMI is the catalyst for SOA’s recent inroads into the utility world,” he says.
And, it looks like SOA’s popularity may be on the rise. LODESTAR’s Hamilton reports seeing an increasing number of RFPs and RFIs reference service-oriented architecture over the last 12 months. Like Rouillard, he cites AMI as the driver for all this interest.
“The amount of data that’s going to be exchanged and moved from place to place will be much greater with AMI” than it was with traditional meter-reading methods or mere automation, Hamilton says. “The promise of SOA is to handle those volumes of data in a robust, scalable and flexible IT architecture.”
