John McDonald, Director of Technical Strategy and Policy Development at GE Energy and Chair of Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), in his opening comments at the inaugural meeting of the SGIP as an independent self-sustaining entity, made a strong case for why interoperability is even more important now than it was in 2009 when NIST initiated SGIP.
Back in those days vendors like GE were selling products and interoperability was to a large extent the customer's problem. But over the last few years GE realized that selling products put the onus on the customer to figure out how to integrate GE products to solve specific business problems. Since then there has been a "solution revolution" at GE where GE now focuses on understanding the customer's business problem and then builds a solution by integrating components from across GE's many divisions and product groups to solve the problem. GE even created a new overarching group GE Digital Energy responsible for smart grid solutions. The result has been a much more holistic approach to the smart grid.
But after doing this, they quickly realized just how critical all these components working together was to delivering successful solutions. They also recognized that product maturity was not what they expected. The result was that at GE interoperability became even more important than it had been back in the days when they sold products, which is one of the reasons that GE is a major supporter of SGIP and a Conference Sponsor.
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