With today’s ever-changing economic climate and government initiatives, it’s more important than ever for utility companies and administrations to create better solutions for generation, transmission and distribution—solutions that not only save money and protect the integrity of the transmission and distribution grids but also enable innovative new services and improve business processes.

The energy and utilities industry continues to change dramatically in structure and numbers, influenced heavily by changes in regulations and continuing merger and acquisition activity. There are more than 239 investor-owned utilities, 2,000 publicly-owned utilities and 900 consumer-owned utilities that provide electric, natural gas, water supply and wastewater treatment.

The top business issues identified by utilities managers are:

• Security (information and physical)
• Reliability
• Regulatory actions/changes
• Supply adequacy
• Cost management or savings
• Energy procurement and flexibility
• Optimization
• HR/intellectual capital management
• Consumer eEducation