OSS software goes beyond telco to serve energy networks

The search for cleaner and alternative sources of energy has led to huge expansion in wind energy generation over recent years. Wind farms are by their nature geographically dispersed and isolated and represent a distributed network management problem for wind farm operators. An operator will typically have equipment from multiple turbine vendors each with their own local SCADA-based management systems. And so, once wind farm build-out has been completed, an operator's focus turns to maximizing revenue by ensuring maximum network availability with optimized OPEX.

Based in the Republic of Ireland, ServusNet has developed an operations and maintenance management platform specifically designed to address the challenges posed for both wind farm owner/operators and the sector's outsourced managed services companies.

'Our focus is at the business and operational level,' says Des Farren, CEO at ServusNet. 'We're looking to improve productivity and predictability of supply for these operators and to make it easier for renewable energy suppliers - of all types - to compete more easily with traditional providers in integrating and delivering onto an energy grid.'

'We faced two big challenges. Firstly to deliver value-added applications fast and ahead of the competition and secondly to solve the infrastructure problem of extracting data from various turbine vendors and normalizing that data into one, unified view.'

'Nokia Siemens Networks OES provided a perfect match for the issues we faced. It had all the functionality we needed - for our application framework - straight out of the box, giving our solution a rapid time to market. In fact, using a very small development team, we had the first end-to-end feature on demo at a customer just two months from starting the project.We had been looking around for something that would adapt readily from telco to wind technology, Nokia Siemens Networks provided this robust, reliable and scalable solution that has the headroom for growth we need.'

'Also the fact that Nokia Siemens Networks software is built on Java - and enterprise Java at that - is really important too. We've all worked in the telco industry previously and seen several O&M systems come and go over the years, but OES is well specified with plenty of interfaces and all the other advantages that Java brings.'

'The number of turbines we're dealing with here is relatively small compared to the number of network elements in a telco scenario, so we're not currently pushing the limits of OES' capability,' says Sean Condon, Product Development Manager at ServusNet. 'But because it is so highly scalable, from six or eight servers right down to just a single server, it wins out with our cost conscious customers and solves the challenge of scalability particularly well.'

A typical ServusNet customer will have multiple wind farms, potentially distributed across Europe with each farm comprising anywhere from 10 to perhaps hundreds of turbines. As the energy markets evolve, these renewable energy operators face increased competition for contracts to supply national or regional grids. As part of their SLAs they must guarantee supply and price to which penalties will apply if not met. This is where ServusNet's offering brings dividends in planning and optimizing delivery.

Many wind farm owners look to managed services companies to outsource the operation and maintenance of their network. Just like telco network management, this has become a popular way to offload complexity and concentrate on the business issues like cost sensitivity and the onerous SLAs they must meet. And as operators grow, their portfolio can diversify into other areas such as solar, wave or tidal energy, thus increasing complexity exponentially.

'Going forward OES will let us add more turbine vendors more quickly by using its Instant Adaptation SDK and build better features on top with greater productivity,' continues Sean. 'It will also make it easier for us to diversify into other renewable energy sectors too, like solar power. To that end OES acts as a generic platform, it's potentially suitable for operations and maintenance in almost any industry.'

'I think this is where Nokia Siemens Networks have been really far sighted. By building such a general purpose platform - not one that's specifically tied to telco - that can fit almost any use case of O&M in almost any kind of equipment. One of the terms that we heard about before we even got involved with Nokia Siemens Networks was that they were thought leaders in this area and they've certainly borne this out with what they've done with OES.'

ServusNet will be demonstrating their solution at Management World.

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