May 31, 2007
Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) has been selected by a large number of North Carolina's 27 Electric Cooperatives as their supplier of SCADA and Distribution Management System (DMS) functionality.
The 27 Electric Membership Cooperatives in North Carolina serve more than 850,000 households and businesses in 93 of North Carolina's 100 counties. Each of the 27 cooperatives is a member-owned, not-for-profit organization, overseen by a board of directors elected by the membership.
The major objective for this project has been the implementation of a modern and open control system for North Carolina Electric Cooperatives, and the adoption of a standard system platform across member systems to facilitate their support and maintenance. EMC Technologies, a cooperative-owned company, used a rigorous process in evaluating various suppliers for this project, including a comprehensive independent survey of the suppliers user base. OSI was selected as the lead supplier due to its superior newer technology, large satisfied customer base, commitment to the utility market and overall corporate strength.
"We looked at many systems before choosing OSI as our SCADA vendor. We were looking for a system that would integrate well with our other systems like GIS, OMS and our Engineering package. With OSI we found a company that was willing to adapt to our needs rather than us conforming to their system," said Victor Burns, Engineering Technician at Central EMC, which is participating in the first group of system implementation. "Also, because of their open platform, it will allow us to keep the operating system up to date as time goes on. We look forward to a strong working relationship with OSI as we move into the future."
OSI will supply up to 20 SCADA/DMS systems to replace the present Valmet/Telvent SCADA systems installed in the 1990s.
The proposed systems are based on OSI's monarch lite™ distributed open architecture and include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, Historical Information System, Database Disturbance Collection, Open Database Connectivity, Calculation and Trending subsystems and DNP communications. The delivered systems are MultiSpeak compliant and some will interface with existing outage management and ESRI GIS systems.
The individual projects will be executed in groups of systems consisting of 6-8 cooperatives, and implemented on a six month schedule from contract signing to cutover for each group.
"We are pleased to be selected as the successful supplier for these North Carolina systems. We are very happy that OSI's track record with our superior technology, satisfied customer base and commitment to the industry was recognized by EMC Technologies and withstood its detailed scrutiny. As usual, we will strive to make this project a success and will ensure that all new users will be as satisfied as the rest of our customers, said Bahman Hoveida, President and CEO of OSI.
North Carolina's electric cooperatives provide energy to 2.5 million people in 93 of 100 counties, primarily in the rural parts of state. The electric cooperatives own and maintain 95,000 miles of power lines, by far the most of any electric utility in North Carolina.
EMC Technologies (www.emct.net) provides information technology consulting services to North Carolina's Electric Cooperatives and their members. These services include network engineering, software development and energy management services.
OSI (www.osii.com) provides open, state-of-the-art, and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide. These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems, Network Management Systems (NMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS) and Generation Management Systems (GMS), as well as individual software and hardware products and e-business solutions for utility operations. OSI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
For additional information regarding this news release please contact news@osii.com.
