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Azure based public system helps light up ETSA Utilities' electricity network map

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“LURED by the potential to rapidly scale IT systems during times of peak customer demand, one South Australian company is taking its first steps into the world of public cloud computing”.aus

This is a quote from the article titledPublic system helps light up ETSA Utilities' electricity network map from Dana Rankine, Acting IT Manager, ETSA Utilities (Australia) in an interview with Ian Grayson from The Australian.

We often talk about the cloud in this blog and for good reason as we have bet the future of the company around the cloud which includes the public, hybrid and private cloud environments. We often refer to this as the cloud on your terms, for your specific and unique business applications. For ETSA Utilities it means they were sold on the ability to rapidly scale IT systems during times of peak customer demand.

ETSA Utilities, which operates and maintains the South Australian electricity distribution network, is carrying out final testing of a public cloud-based system for street light outage reporting that it hopes will streamline the handling of many customer-reported faults.

As Dana Rankine says in the article : Rather than building the supporting infrastructure in-house, a decision was made to explore the potential of a public cloud platform; After reviewing a range of alternatives, a decision was taken earlier this year to use Microsoft's Azure public cloud offering; The Azure platform is a .NET environment and so it allows us to leverage the experience and expertise we have in house; During the next 18 months, there are plans to move other "customer interfacing projects" across to Azure ; It is a cost efficient solution; it is important to get that high availability and be able to scale quickly during times of peak demand like power outages."

We are seeing more and more Utilities thinking like ESTA in their approach to applications that need to be highly scalable, consistent, and elastic. The story is definitely worth a read. – Jon C. Arnold

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2011
    Jon - Here are a few utilities here in the US who have undertaken the deployment of a similar solution, albeit using Bing Maps instead of Google for the underlying mapping. www.nipsco.com/.../streetlight_outage.aspx www.gulfpower.com/.../lightsout.asp www.pepco.com/.../outagemap The power and flexibility of the cloud were key drivers in these decisions. The ability to deliver the data to any device and share it across diverse organizations involved in outdoor light management is another key driver for a hosted platform.