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By Jesse Berst
· The gradual merger of IT and OT
· Cisco's ability to pull products and expertise from other sectors and apply them to the smart grid
· Cisco's ability to allow legacy systems to play in the IP world
· Cisco's determination to deliver multiple applications over a single platform
As evidence that these themes are resonating with customers, Cisco revealed that it racked up an additional 175 customer deployments worldwide in 2012. I spoke with Cisco vice presidents Lionel Chocron and David Goddard about the three new offerings announced today:
1. Cisco Utility Operational Network Solution is a suite of products that give operators a single view of multiple networks. Or perhaps a better description is that it merges siloed networks (including legacy networks) so that all kinds of information – telemetry, AMI data, voice, video – can be delivered over a single network.
2. Cisco Connected Grid Design Suite gives engineers a unified view of both the electric and the communications networks – unified modeling, unified design, unified configuration, unified monitoring, etc.
This should prove of great value to substation engineers, who are being asked to integrate more and more IED's and cope with more and more communications networks. "We have been able to document time savings of up to 90%," Chocron told me. "That moves the time to set up from weeks to days." The suite has been extensively proven out by China State Grid among others.
3. Cisco Incident Response and Workforce Enablement Solution integrates and unifies multiple communication systems to simplify outage management. Operators can use their legacy radios and networks while adding important functions. Cisco brought over much of this functionality from the public safety sector, while enhancing it for the particulars of the utility market.
It is impressive to learn how Cisco has integrated existing radio systems into an IP network. As Goddard put it: "Now you can have push-to-talk anywhere, across disparate radios and networks, with everybody involved in the same discussion."
I will leave it to the power engineers in the audience to determine if Cisco's offerings are as robust as needed. But I continue to be impressed that Cisco is tackling the tough problems. And utilities are indeed faced with some difficult issues:
· Over the past few decades, projects were typically siloed in different departments, leading to "islands of automation" scattered throughout the system
· Many of those projects took their own special pathways into the substation, leading to a morass of different approaches
· Many of those approaches are nearing the end of their life and/or don't have the features and security required today
Given these realities, Cisco is making an effort to merge and unify the situation. If they succeed, they will blaze a path for utilities to wring as much value as possible from legacy systems while still getting the benefits of modernization.
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