Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, and Red Hat business partner, Int3s, have revealed that Toronto Hydro Corporation has deployed JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform for its smart meter programme and has completed the initial phases of its programme to create a customer-focused cost and energy-saving initiative.
Eduardo Bresani, vice president of IT and chief information officer, Toronto Hydro, said: “We’ve succeeded because of the combination of the leadership of Toronto Hydro, the innovation of Red Hat products, and the expertise of Int3s in integrating systems. Together they allowed us to leverage the power of JBoss and really make the technology work for us.”
Toronto Hydro identified the need for a five-year technology initiative, with the goal to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace the organization’s traditional IT infrastructure.
The new SOA implementation began as part of Toronto Hydro’s smart meter initiative, which aims to utilize the SOA platform to introduce variable pricing based on the time of day that electricity is consumed and to price it accordingly to encourage customers to conserve during periods of high demand.
Toronto Hydro’s technology strategy required resources to supplement internal staff in delivering custom development projects and it partnered with Int3s to help implement JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including JBoss ESB.
Toronto Hydro and Int3s selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for the smart meter programme due to the size and stability of the technology and the toolsets that JBoss provided, including JBoss Hibernate, Rules, and jBPM Frameworks, to simplify the migration from Mule to the JBoss platform, Red Hat said.
Nicholas Yee, chief technology officer of Int3s, said: “JBoss technology comes with everything we need to build a solid SOA for facilitating easy integration of disparate systems and data. It was the perfect solution to meet our current needs – and we trust Red Hat to meet our future ones.”
Since the initial smart meter implementation, Int3s has expanded the use of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform at Toronto Hydro in multiple projects including the development of an extract, transform and load (ETL) framework for a new enterprise data warehouse and integration to various applications.
Toronto Hydro is a municipal electric distribution utility in Canada and operates two wholly owned affiliates. It serves approximately 697,000 residential and commercial customers across the greater Toronto Area, representing 18.5% of electricity consumers in the province of Ontario.