06/16/2005

Fiorano Software, Inc., a provider of business integration and enterprise messaging solutions, announced today that Northern California Power Agency (NCPA) has deployed Fiorano ESB to power their Web Services based Energy Scheduling Solution.

The company provided the following additional information:

There was a time when the electric power industry was a laid back, predictable field. Not anymore. Constantly changing government mandates, industry deregulation, limited production capacity, an aging infrastructure, and shifting populations are all placing huge demands on utilities and power companies. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the state of California.

NCPA, a joint action agency comprised of 18 cities, rural electric cooperatives, special districts, and other public entities from Redding in the north to Lompoc in the south, helps its members purchase, generate, transmit, and conserve electric power. According to Mark Myers, NCPA’s electric power application architect, those jobs have become increasingly difficult.

“Regulations here in California change almost daily. What’s more, timelines for energy scheduling can be just a few hours in length,” Myers says. “To keep costs low for our members, we’re adopting new applications that can coordinate power scheduling within these collapsed timelines.”

NCPA’s primary business partners have been moving to XML-based web services as the preferred method for data exchange. However, NCPA had historically used a data-centric client/server model to facilitate data flows with members and outside partners. The agency also wrote many of its own applications using a monolithic approach which did not allow the development and reuse of common libraries.

“Total cost of ownership for our legacy applications was rising,” Myers noted. “It became clear that to leverage the benefits of our partners’ web services approach, we needed to move to a layered web application architecture.”

While the agency’s new focus on web-based applications was clearly the right one, the IT management team also knew it needed a business integration platform that could leverage NCPA’s well conceived database structure with legacy applications and new applications and services. For this key middleware component, NCPA chose Fiorano ESB.

“What we like about Fiorano ESB, in addition to its terrific feature set, is its open standards support for both .NET and Java. Since our plan was to use .NET wherever possible, but also employ J2EE where appropriate, Fiorano ESB was an obvious choice,” Myers stated.

Fiorano ESB is the first Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform that uses standardized interfaces for a full range of data tasks, from communication and transformation to portability and security. Its standards-based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows enterprises to draw on existing business logic residing anywhere within their application environments to quickly assemble efficient solutions for business problems.

Within weeks of its choice, the NCPA development team began installing Fiorano ESB between its Oracle databases and its mix of in-house and off-the-shelf software. The agency started small, employing one or two developers to connect with a few NCPA-built applications, then adding staff and additional applications as it learned. “Fiorano was very good about resolving any issue we encountered,” Myers recalled. “Unlike many software vendors, Fiorano’s technical staff is comprised of former product developers, so we could easily talk about deep technical issues with them.”

With the new, ESB-enabled web services environment taking shape, NCPA begun to realize the benefits of near-real time data exchange; scheduling decisions based on a demand forecast could be coordinated across NCPA network; market dispatch instructions could be received and validated prior to their issuance to generating plants; and data could be sent back in near real-time to NCPA members to help assess their position in the market.

“We were even able to create a remote application capability using serialized .NET classes,” Myers mentioned. “The process is similar to .NET Remoting, but since we use Java Messaging Service, we instead serialize and compress business objects to a base 64 string, using the string as the JMS payload. The receiver then decompresses and deserializes the object. This capability was an unexpected plus that has really added to the productivity of our system.”

With no letup of regulatory changes or energy market volatility in sight, Myers says the new Fiorano ESB-enabled web services architecture is invaluable. “We can now do things we simply couldn’t before,” he states. “Not only can we efficiently share data with our members, but we also have the flexibility to accommodate regulatory and market changes as they occur through better integration, failover protection, and system monitoring. Best of all, the customers of our NCPA members are the ones that really benefit, through lower electric bills.”