“IBM and Apple on Tuesday will roll out an iOS app aimed at the energy sector called Field Connect, which provides personalized features such as alerts, notifications and training,” Larry Dignan reports for ZDNet. “The app will be a piece of IBM’s cloud analytics push for utilities with the launch of IBM Insights Foundation for Energy, which will track a grid from individual transformers to the entire grid.”
“But the big question is how easy will it be for the energy sector to ultimately adopt and use these apps and the infrastructure behind them,” Dignan reports. “IBM simply has more moving parts in the partnership compared to Apple, which is basically moving hardware—lots of iPhones and iPads.”
“You can bet that Apple will get most of the spoils on the front end,” Dignan reports. “What will be interesting to watch is whether IBM lands deals on the back end.”
Read more in the full article here.
This IBM deal has certainly raised some attention for Big Blue, I’ve noticed much more interest around IBM’s Bluemix cloud services for iOS apps.
My company adopted Bluemix for our latest project instead of going with the usual AWS or Azure. We’re liking it a lot.
“But the big question is how easy will it be for the energy sector to ultimately adopt and use these apps and the infrastructure behind them,” Dignan reports.
The utility industry has been adopting Smart Metering technology for decades. If your meter has a digital display you have a smart meter and your utility could take advantage of this application. Metering tech make about $40 per hour, and you can more than double that by the time overhead for each employee is calculated (when estimating a job the actual labor was multiplied by 2.1 to arrive at actual cost at the utility I worked for). Anything that saves an hour a day for 200 techs will get a company’s attention. Home grown solutions are usually adopted first, but then swiftly bypassed by commercial operations once the concepts are developed with home grown solutions. We originally wrote our own data validation, error detection, and estimating software as part of a home grown data warehouse application. After 10 years of use and ongoing development we opted for a commercial, off-the-shelf solution. But only after those solutions surpassed what we could make ourselves. That’s the stage this is at. There are many home grown quick data retrieval solutions out there now. If IBM makes a run-key solution that performs as well or slightly better it will be adopted swiftly.
“…turn-key…”, not “…run-key…”. Fscking spellcheck!
I think you spelled “Fsck” wrong.
Fsck would be the system utility “fsck” (for “file system consistency check”) tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix. What other term did you have in mind?