Itron is expanding its long-term partnership with Microsoft to accelerate cloud adoption and the next generation of consumer and grid edge solutions for the utility and smart cities industries.
Itron is a company that enables utilities and cities to safely deliver infrastructuree solutions to communities across the world.
The partnership brings together Itron’s leading energy management solutions and Microsoft’s leading cloud solutions to transform how users manage and view their energy, and how utilities meet the demands of a rapidly changing industry. The collaboration aims to develop solutions that deliver unmatched insights and benefits, so that utilities, communities, and enterprises can reach their goals. This includes grid resilience, consumer engagement, operational efficiency, and decarbonisation.
Itron and Microsoft forecast to address industry challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, carbon tracking, zero carbon goals, clean energy matching, data accessibility and operational insights. This comes with a key focus on security, reliability, and value.
Network visibility, asset management, outage management and insights into Electric Vehicle and distributed energy resources loads that are essential to enabling a decarbonised grids, are many of the insights that will be addressed.
The partnership has a commitment to accelerating the path to net zero and therefore, will deliver integrated solutions to measure and report to ensure that this goal is reached for utilities and their customers.
Utilities will also be able to unlock additional value and data from their smart grid implementations, including new use cases such as location awareness, intelligent voltage monitoring, real-time transformer load monitoring, EV and solar awareness, active premise load shedding and more.
Itron has said that “by increasing the number of cloud ready solutions for the next-next generation technology stack, the partnership will allow faster deployment, increase cost effectiveness, and enhance security and resilience. With Microsoft, Iron is accelerating the extension of its leading Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), data management and analytic solutions to the cloud in global markets.”
The continued collaboration will allow Itron to identify utility and city customers across the globe who can benefit from already existing solutions and reach global enterprises with critical energy and decarbonisation requirements. They hope to help more customers effectively shift operations into the cloud and take advantage of innovative and emerging solutions to meet critical operational, service and sustainability goals.
Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes at Itron has said, “expanding our collaboration with Microsoft is core to our commitment to delivering industry-leading solutions that make it easier for end-users to reduce their carbon footprint and conserve water. Our collaboration will provide analytics and data-sharing capabilities for utilities and cities, so they can optimize their operations and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
He continues to say: “As utilities begin to deploy edge compute-enabled connected IoT platforms, a new level of collaboration and co-innovation is needed for the utilities to harvest the unprecedented opportunity for growth and creating value. With Microsoft’s advanced cloud technology combined with Itron’s industry expertise, we are optimizing existing solutions and building new ones in an emerging and rapidly changing market.”
Daryl Willis, CVP Worldwide Energy Industry, Microsoft, has also commented on the partnership saying: “The collaboration between Itron and Microsoft will enable utilities and smart cities to take advantage of cloud computing technology—in particular, edge computing—to accelerate cloud-native analytics, distribution automation, carbon reporting and provide an overall more flexible, scalable system that supports a distributed, resilient energy grid.”
