Background

EnergyComNetwork (ECN) was founded to provide the missing link between Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) technologies and the utility front office operations and financial management systems.  The integration of approximately twenty (20) modular components is accomplished through a concentric independent “Middleware” application designed to allow the seamless communication of data from one application module to another.

This Middleware approach allows all systems (and utility departments) to access and integrate data that would otherwise have very limited value. The majority of these communications are accomplished through Web-Services  which makes for an very efficient, quick and cost effective data connection path.  For example, connections between billing systems, meter data management systems, AMI and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been accomplished in as little as one week.

Although our background is utilities, engineering, implementation of AMI/AMR systems, and billing software development, we have discovered over the years that for business operations to be efficient and effective, all of the systems within a utility operation need to exchange and share a variety of data elements.  This can be extremely difficult with a wide variety of proprietary applications.  To date, this exchange has been very cumbersome, expensive and customized for each utility and their specific software systems and applications.  To overcome these obstacles, we have developed a generic Common MiddleWare Interface (CMI) to function as a universal data communications module with over twenty application environments.