By Liz Enbysk

SGN Managing Editor

The words and phrases they use may differ slightly, but our smart grid industry insiders see a decade of integration at many levels ahead of us. Read why they say that and it makes a lot of sense.

For instance Ron Sege, Echelon CEO, talks about "the inefficient notion of using a dedicated system for meter reading, another for outage detection and management, and another for distribution optimization just does not make sense from a return-on-investment standpoint."

Sege expects a multi-platform approach to emerge. It's one he says will rely on the development of a non-technology trend which is, as he puts it, "The de-siloization of departments in utilities, cities and enterprises. Organizations will become flat and horizontal, not vertical and siloed," he says. "This means that meter shops will work with T&D shops, street lighting departments will work with signal light people, and so on."

Clinton Davis, the Ventyx Director of Product Strategy, Smart Grid, sees a similar trend in the distribution management arena. "Utilities," he says, "are not interested in simply installing a standalone distribution management system; they're in the business of grid management."

"Utilities will seek a comprehensive, integrated solution that can manage the full smart grid lifecycle," Davis believes, "from developing and managing demand response programs, to automating distribution and outage management with advanced technologies."

It's back to enabling people, processes and things â€“ or what Lionel Chocron and his colleagues at Cisco term the "Internet of Everything."

"Only 0.2% of the world is connected and as we connect the unconnected, the potential to improve operations and productivity will drive changes across sectors as diverse as health care, manufacturing and energy," adds Chocron, General Manager for Cisco's Connected Energy Networks Business Unit.

How that plays out in the smart grid is in the shift in control systems from centralized control to distributed intelligence and control, says Chocron, who notes that the number of networked devices on the electric grid is expected to reach 55 million by 2015 – or 2.5 times the number today.

New architectures

As a result, he expects to see grid operators distribute more system monitoring and decision making closer to the network edge for more efficient management and response. "This requires," Chocron says, "a layered architecture to support the required management, security and coordination."

Though he labels it a hybrid architecture for control systems, Schneider Electric's Don Rickey agrees more integration is on the way. "No longer is the debate over whether intelligence should be distributed or centralized," says Rickey, SVP of Schneider's Infrastructure Business. "Hybrid architectures with intelligence shared between edge devices and central systems is the trend going forward."

But Rickey says the complexity of the integrations in a hybrid architecture will require communications and more standards.

Open, standards-based IT systems that allow for easy integration and data sharing, and that optimize back office solutions, will be more and more attractive in years to come,  suggests Rodger Smith, SVP and General Manager, Utilities at Oracle. The reason for that, he says, is that "utilities are moving to drive down the total cost of ownership, and are looking to integrated technology solutions to do that for them."

And it doesn't stop there.