Joanne Cummings has an interesting story in Network World today about an electricity utility in the US Pacific Northwest which is using SOA.
The story reminded me of another user of SOA in the utility space: EPAL in Portugal. EPAL is the Portugese state water board. They use SOA to provide customer-facing information about water usage, and they use XML networking infrastructure and an event-driven model.
Utilities are widespread users of Real World SOA , though the goal here is not competitive advantage: The intriguing thing about the two case studies is that the goal in both cases is to cause their customers to use less of their products. By providing real-time insight into their rates and usage, they can do this (the customer thinks "it costs *that* much????").
There is no comparable EPAL case study online, but here is a snippit from one of our press releases:
Empresa Portuguesa de Aguas Livres (EPAL), the largest water supplier in Portugal, selected Vordel to provide security for its XML-based online services. "We are delighted with the way that VordelSecure is able to communicate with all the systems we currently have running," said Dr. Luis Novaes dos Reis, CIO at EPAL. "It can handle existing security methods, talk to the legacy systems, as well as run in tandem with the new application servers. VordelSecure was also fast to implement, and, because of its ability to leverage the existing architecture and reduce security maintenance costs, will deliver significant savings to EPAL."
1:49:36 PM 
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