The emerging intelligent data ecosystem

Last month I was invited by one of our major customers in Europe to keynote their annual innovation event for over 500 of their senior managers on how the rise of cloud computing and the business of big data has impacted and will further impact the electricity industry and power utilities worldwide. During the presentation I painted a picture of the emerging intelligent data ecosystem and how the cloud acts as a hub that pulls together information from cities, utilities, electric vehicles, homes, industrial customers, and so on. As we embed more and more sensors and intelligent devices into our infrastructure, this intelligent data ecosystem evolves into the Internet of your Things (IoyT) to create business models that are far different than today’s largely static information architectures. Some of the examples I used were our smart metering intelligence demonstration, our smart elevator machine learning research, the work we are doing on our CityNext initiative and our productivity vision future vision.

It was a terrific meeting and I would encourage all Utilities to follow this lead and set aside time for their business leaders to reflect on how the cloud and big data megatrends are going to reshape their businesses. - Jon C. Arnold