XML—Lingua Franca of Energy Commerce

 

A case study from Maryland on electric restructuring.

The restructuring of the old utility-owned energy industry is changing how we do business. But there's a catch. We have to overcome systems and business processes built around a vertically integrated industry. With the fragmentation of the vertically integrated utility has come market participants with widely differing information technology systems, broken down along business type, size, volume, geography, jurisdictional and technological lines.

To collaborate fully, players in a new market need a-a common language and understanding that allows separate systems and businesses to communicate and exchange information around shared business processes.

Without such universally accepted standards and language, utilities and energy companies-power producers, transmission and transportation companies, distributors and retailers-are forced to manage widely varying forms of data exchange. The costs of this variety of forms of data exchange is seen in greater inefficiency, increased risk of service failure and higher transaction costs.

Yet, it need not be so. Instead, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is emerging as the standard for collaboration between disparate systems. This acceptance comes because XML is technologically suitable for the most advanced collaboration medium in business today-the Internet. Moreover, XML has won near-unanimous acceptance by the software community.

An Event-Driven Economy

We inexorably are moving towards an event-driven energy economy, where customer demand for energy is fulfilled by coordinated efforts among many participants.