It’s Time for the Next Wave

Microsoft has just published the Smart Energy Reference Architecture SERA v2.0, after many months of diligent work on the part of architects, partners and Microsoft engineers combined. The document has grown slightly from the SERA version 1.0 length of 130 pages: SERA v2.0 is now 255 pages. The principle of addressing industry challenges first and then discussing how the Microsoft stack can be used to address those challenges is maintained in the new version, with the first 163 pages being technology agnostic. One industry analyst, Jesse Berst, describes SERA v2.0 as: What every utility can learn from Microsoft and we would encourage you to read the analysis.. 

Some of the new content was driven by the rapid advances in Microsoft technologies and new solution offerings. This includes many new relevant products, not the least of which are Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure, SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Windows Phone 8 and Dynamics. The technology advances are truly profound and can significantly change the way Utilities do business.

However, the majority of the content has been driven by the SERA Advisory Council which is a working group composed of partners and customers. The Foundational Pillars and the Advisory Council’s areas of focus resulting in the New Developments in SERA 2.0 are in the graphic at the right. Not to repeat the document here, these topics are front and center to virtually every Utility today and SERA provides relevant guidance for how to think about and address each.

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to our partners and customers who labored through multiple reviews and contributed much of the content. We would not have been able to produce this quality document without their help. - Larry Cochrane