Riding the Momentum Wave: Microsoft Delivers Hohm, SERA, Windows 7

It’s my hope that our power and utilities customers are feeling the momentum from a wave of new Microsoft solutions and thought leadership documents that are geared toward helping them make the transformation to the Smart Energy Ecosystem. It’s truly an exciting time!

Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows 7 (more on that in a later blog).

And that follows the release of Microsoft Hohm several months ago and the Microsoft Worldwide Utilities group release two weeks ago of the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA), a 130-page document intended to help utilities understand how Microsoft technologies address their implementation of the smart energy ecosystem. 

The media’s reaction to our SERA announcement has been outstanding. At least 12 articles have been published to date and there are more to come, in major publications, in coming days and weeks.

To give you a quick overview, I think the quote below from a story on Smart-Grid.TMCnet.com does a great job of summing up the reaction so far:

“No vendor has all the answers, and each must play to its native strengths. In Microsoft’s case, SERA is the next step along the way to a totally integrated, end-to-end smart grid ecosystem. SERA addresses the network environment, but also ties in neatly to Microsoft’s Hohm initiative, which my ICP partner, Shidan Gouran, wrote about here last week . On its own, Hohm competes directly against Google ( News - Alert ) PowerMeter, but that’s where the comparison ends. Google is not a data network play, but Microsoft is. In the scenarios where a utility is deploying both Hohm and SERA, Microsoft will truly have it all, and I have no doubt they will get their share of the end-to-end market.”

Well put.

In the interest of full disclosure: It’s amazing to me that the quote above was written by another “Jon Arnold,” the co-founder of Intelligent Communications Partners, and no relation to me. What are the odds that two people would have the same name, same spelling (Jon Arnold) and be involved in the evolution of the Smart Grid? Truly amazing! Someone should blog on that! -- Jon C. Arnold