If you are in WindPower 2008 , visit us at booth 1815. At Siterra we are seeing tremendous interest in our Renewable Energy Offering. As we speak we have three customers already using our software in rolling out Wind Farms and Solar Farms.
Talk to Barbara Martin, Gary Williamson and Robert Suess and you will get to see/hear about case studies and examples of how our customers have benefited from our solution.
We rolled out Version 2.0 of our Siterra + platform to all our Multi-Tenant customers last week. With this release customers will notice a fresh brand new User Interface. Some of the key things you will notice on the user interface right away are
Some additional usability enhancements you will find in the application
icon to Maximize/Minimize the region. Now the entire region header is clickable.Functional Updates
You should find the complete list of all the updates in the Release Notes that is provided as part of the Product Wiki.
On-Demand Human Capital Management (HCM) application provider Workday announced that it landed a largest ever SaaS deal to date. It announced that global electronics contract manufacturer Flextronics signed a 200,000 user deal to use the software to manage its entire workforce.
While this is not going to be the standard size of SaaS deals that are going to be the norm, this should firmly validate the relevance of SaaS as a platform for enterprise applications. Moreover, it should also help companies get past the mental hurdle around having their critical data sitting outside their firewall. If anything, HR data is probably the most critical data (from Privacy concerns and given the litigous nature of this country) after Financials that a company safeguards.
While I can see the naysayers raising the issue of compliance (HIPAA, GLB etc) around personal data being hosted by a third party company and potentially some outsourced IT management company having access to the data, I would say - How is that different from your Credit Card data or How is that different from your Bank Data?
A new report from Department of Energy states that by 2030, 20% of the Energy needs generation could be Wind Energy. http://www.doe.gov/news/6253.htm
The highlight of the report is the fact that the Wind Farm installations should triple annually to meet this goal bodes really well for the Wind Energy Equipment manufacturers.
Early days of 2000 ushered in the first wave of digital business-to-business integrations between systems run across trading partner companies in the form of Marketplaces, Auctions, Hubs. While it brought about the sharing of data from multiple companies in a single hub for easy access, the transactions conducted were focussed on pairing up suppliers, comparing their offerings and negotiatiating the best price possible. While it experienced limited success, the collaboration was limited to two companies in any given transaction - Buyer and Supplier. Companies like Covisint, Commerce One, Oracle, Ariba provided the thrust for the first round B2B Collaboration.
With more and more companies modeling their offering on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, and customers increasingly seeing the value proposition of moving to a SaaS model, I think the next generation of a full blown Multi-Enterprise Collaboration is becoming a reality. The infrastructure hurdles (DMZ, Extranet, Security) that prevented the companies from establishing a truly collaborative platform and conduct business have disappeared with the more and more applications being available “in cloud”. The widespread adoption of Web Services, Elastic Cloud infrastructure are doing their part in giving the necessary comfort to CIOs of companies to adopt SaaS model. The mental hurdle around losing control on their data is slowly waning thanks to the challenges posed by the growing costs of managing global infrastructure and resources.
Consider the following scenario in a Service Value Chain.
Wireless Carriers have long had numerous challenges in rolling out massive infrastructure deployments across the country. The stakeholders participating in the rollout of these deployments include (but not limited to)
If you consider the information exchange between these entities and the inter-relationship between the activities performed by each of these participants, not having a common platform to conduct business is a recipe for costly project overruns, missed deadlines and consequently the missed opportunity. Ability for companies to effectively translate their innovations into reality eventually comes down to their ability to execute.
Here are some distinct benefits of SaaS brings to the collaboration effort
Further elaborating the details of the US leadership in Wind Energy production, check the state by state breakdown of the installed capacity.
Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Texas Billionaire T. Boone Pickens (personally, I think his name should be Think Big Pickens, based on his penchant for doing Big Things) has turned his attention to Wind Energy. His company Mesa Power, is embarking on a $10B project to install 27,000 Wind turbines in 200,000 acres of the Texas panhandle. When completed this will be the single largest wind farm. It is estimated to supply 4000 Megawatts of electricity.
To kick start this project, he is making the first downpayment on 500 Turbines at $2M each.
If you thought - wow! he is really concerned about the environment here is what he had to say
“Don’t get the idea that I’ve turned green,” Pickens told the Guardian from his Dallas office. “My business is making money, and I think this is going to make a lot of money.”
If you were wondering what made him interested in making such a big decision - here is another interesting story
For years he has been shooting Bobwhite quail on his 68,000-acre ranch in the panhandle. “I’ve been hunting quail for 50 years, I know where the wind is,” Pickens says.
The scheme is to have the neighborhood ranch owners to sign up in return for annual royalties between $10,000 to $20,000.
But with all the focus on money, I think he still has the interests of US in mind. check his quote
“You need a giant plan for America. Not the pissant 83 megawatt [windfarm] deals being stamped all over the country. There needs to be a huge plan from someone with leadership. It’s going to take years to do, but it has to start now.” Only then, he explains, can the US stop what he regards as the madness of a flood of money flowing out of America to the oil producers of the Middle East. “That money is going God knows where - a few friends, a lot of enemies. We’ve got to stop it.”
Wind Energy - in simple terms is energy generated from Wind. Wind has been free natural resource available to human kind. Unlike the common fossil fuels we know of, i.e, Natural Gas, Coal and Petroleum, wind is available in abundance and is not likely to run out.
History
The kinetic energy generated by the wind blowing has been used for a variety of purposes throughout the history. Most common examples of the wind power usage that come to mind are
With the increasing demand for the dwindling fossil fuel resources and a worldwide focus to reduce greenhouse gas emission, Wind Energy potential has become magnified. Just to give you an idea of how United States has responded to this new opportunity check the statistics
Windmills/Wind Turbines
You can find a good article in Wikipedia that captures the history and anatomy of a windmill (aka wind turbine).
Planning, Installing, Managing a Wind Farm ( a cluster of wind turbines) is a elaborate process involving various constituents. A typical Wind Farm can take anywhere from 3-4 years from the inception to the time it is fully functional. Siterra helps companies across this entire lifecycle. In the future posts, I will delve into what transpires during one of such deployments.
Siterra has long been known for its leadership position in the assisting customers in executing large budget programs towards building Wireless Infrastructure. All the learning we did, while helping customers in the Wireless Industry, is standing us in good stead as we embark on an interesting and new journey leading and enabling the Renewable Energy infrastructure deployments.
We have been experiencing a tremendous interest in our software offering in the area of Renewable Energy infrastructure deployment both in the Wind Energy and Solar Energy areas. As I write this article, we are in the process of going live with two of our customers in deploying their Wind Farms.
As part of venturing into this new and, dare I say, the fastest growing industry we have had the opportunity to learn a lot, about the dynamics of the Renewable Energy industry. My colleagues and I will use this blog to share what we learn along with our thoughts. This is our way of contributing towards the worldwide imperative of Saving the Planet.
Siterra enables customers to collaborate with their partners in their Service Value Chain to Plan, Build, Deploy, Manage, Track their assets across the world. Customers in the Wireless, Wind Energy, Solar Energy, Retail and Real Estate industries have successfully leveraged the Siterra software-as-a-service(SaaS) platform to execute large billion dollar budget programs to manage their capital assets and gained significant Return on Investment(ROI) through productivity and insight.
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