Gartner has covered outage management systems (OMSs) since 2007 to address the needs of clients seeking solutions to improve their emergency network restoration process. We are updating the Magic Quadrant for OMS vendor assessment to reflect changes in customer buying criteria, which result from emerging business and regulatory trends and consequent changes in vendor offerings.

Extreme weather events — combined with an aging infrastructure that results from protracted low levels of investment in utility delivery infrastructure — are putting a strain on utility companies' efforts to maintain mandated customer service levels. The U.S. alone sustains $17 billion in annual damages due to tornado, hurricane and flood events. The utility industry depends on OMS as a solution to support emergency response and ensure customer service quality, while improving labor efficiency and infrastructure use. Consequently, regulators are likely to decide favorably on cost recovery for investments that can mitigate these issues.

The utility industry is getting increasingly focused on the development of the future energy delivery infrastructure — the intelligent grid (aka the "smart grid"). Among other benefits, the intelligent grid should improve network resilience via the use of advanced control functions such as self-healing and event avoidance. This focus has fueled buyer interest in solutions that can integrate intelligent grid technology into the OMS environment. As a result, OMSs are evolving beyond an emergency response decision support system into a component of an integrated smart grid platform. Integrating OMS products with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) for outage notification and the callback function — as well as including the automated switching operation intended to minimize an affected area through the use of advanced protection systems and local automation — is pushing OMS toward an advanced distribution management system (ADMS). In addition, access to up-to-date consumption data, via the meter data management (MDM) component of AMI, provides a data repository for network analysis, which is required to study the planned switching actions' impact on feeder overload.

Consequently, Gartner predicts the narrowly defined "conventional" OMS to disappear as a distinct software product category during the next four years. The emergency restoration function will still exist, but it is likely to be integrated into a new class of software application — ADMS products — that will provide more-comprehensive distribution operation functionality and incorporate intelligent grid technologies.

Utilities considering the procurement of an OMS should re-evaluate their network operations, customer service strategies and overall smart grid strategy. Accordingly, they should make an appropriate decision whether to install a new OMS, upgrade legacy solutions or wait until a new breed of ADMS comes of age. Some of the legacy solutions provide only a trouble call functionality and lack a limited ability to manage the storm restoration process. Some of the emerging requirements that we hear from our clients regarding solution scope and product architecture are not yet met by current providers.

Utility managers must consider market dynamics, including business and technology drivers, when making OMS investment decisions. For example, in competitive retail markets with unbundled customer and network asset ownership, there is an additional requirement to enable collaboration between two separate entities. The OMS must bridge asset management and customer service management functions in separate organizations. In other markets, merger-and-acquisition activities are creating larger utility companies serving millions of customers spread over large territories. The OMS must be designed for a wide-area deployment — otherwise, utilities may be forced to revert to manual storm restoration management in extreme events.

In addition to focusing on business results — such as increased responsiveness, improvement in reliability, operational efficiency, cost reduction and minimized revenue loss — OMS buyers must ensure that vendor products and services have the scalability and flexibility to accommodate changes in the utility market and evolving distribution operations best practices. Selected products must support high levels of integration with other systems. OMS vendors must be well-versed in best practices in integration architecture, such as enterprise service bus (ESB) and industry data exchange standards (such as Common Information Model [CIM] or MultiSpeak).

In addition, OMS buyers would do well to view OMSs as a service platform for enterprisewide incident response rather than as a departmental product for distribution operations management. Therefore, OMSs should be expected to employ technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and those associated with SOA. These correspond to the current "enterprisation" trends in the utility application area (in other words, aggregation of niche functional applications into integrated product suites). The OMS product's ability to provide automated outage reporting, based on time-stamped switching operations, should not only simplify regulatory auditing but also enable detailed distribution reliability analysis.

OMSs originally emerged from North American electric utility markets, due to the overhead structure of the distribution network and propensity to extreme weather conditions (hurricanes and ice storms), and they have primarily been used by North American electric utilities having radial distribution feeders. The trend among North American companies is to respond to regulatory and customer demands for improved customer responsiveness and provide an auditable network performance history to regulators. Further, development of more-sophisticated network-modeling tools, and current product capabilities to deal with looped distribution networks used in urban areas with greater population densities, are making OMSs more interesting to utilities in EMEA and Asia/Pacific. As emergency restoration is not the main concern for those utilities, products used outside the Americas are known as "distribution management systems." In addition to emergency restoration, DMS products tend to extend their functionality into distribution work management (that is, switching and clearance/safety management); distribution network analysis (such as switching optimization and loss minimization); and some real-time monitoring and control, if distribution supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) coverage is available.

OMSs provide timely, accurate customer-specific and distribution-network-specific outage information to help utilities be more responsive to unplanned network outages. OMSs track, group and display outages; track crew assignments to the outages; and monitor the state of the restoration activities to safely and efficiently manage emergency-related work. In addition, they provide relevant information to stakeholders (such as utility personnel, consumers, media and regulators) on the state of the restoration process. OMSs tightly integrate with call centers to receive trouble calls and provide customer-specific network status, including the estimated restoration time. Based on a network connectivity model and trouble call patterns, OMSs identify the likely location of the faults, eliminating the costly and time-consuming "bird-dogging" to find the outage. OMSs also integrate with SCADA systems for real-time network status to analyze the downstream impact of SCADA-reported switching actions. OMSs are also commonly used for historical outage reporting and automated calculation of reliability indexes, such as the system average interruption duration index (SAIDI) and system average interruption frequency index (SAIFI), based on time-stamped network switching operations, as well as customer-related interruption indexes, such as the customer average interruption duration index (CAIDI).

OMSs require an accurate network connectivity model that reflects the actual distribution network topology, from the distribution substation to each customer connection point. OMSs contain a network outage determination engine, most frequently based on a network-tracing schema that lets customer outage calls automatically roll up to common protective devices so that field operations staff can manage the safest, most effective response. OMSs must be highly available systems that perform well during major events under the most extreme conditions. Modern OMSs must include disaster recovery (DR) remote-failover capabilities, and they are often deployed in two separate control centers for business continuity purposes. OMS products have evolved from two distinct origins:

• Geographic information system (GIS) providers
• Distribution analysis (planning and operational) product vendors

GIS service providers have added OMS functionality to their products (such as GE Energy, Intergraph and Telvent Miner & Miner). They are leveraging their core capability to manage and update the network data model, as well as leveraging the GIS rendering engine for a geographically referenced user interface.

Distribution analysis applications for planning (for example, ABB's Network Manager DMS and Milsoft's DisSPatch) or for operational needs (such as GE Energy's distribution network management product — Enmac) are leveraging their network connectivity models resulting from the overall electric model and use network schematic user interfaces.

Furthermore, we see a few emerging trends in the OMS market:

• As a central component of smart grid initiatives, DMSs are a hot topic now in North America to manage distributed controls and for self-healing features as the next step beyond basic dispatch center OMS functionality. Since North American utilities have had limited access to distribution SCADA, traditional DMS as a software category has been more common in EMEA and Australia/New Zealand. These regions are now pursuing more OMS and intelligent grid functionality. Established DMS vendors may offer a "trouble call subsystem" as a component of their DMS solutions. As the AMI implementation takes greater hold in North America, North American utilities are now considering AMI as a data repository for demand interval data that can enhance distribution analysis for operations. Enhanced load data and event notifications, coupled with historian software, can enhance existing SCADA or distribution management functions. Several suppliers are working on capabilities that leverage AMI data: ABB, Advanced Control Systems (ACS), GE Energy, Oracle Utilities, Siemens, SNC-Lavalin, Telvent (which is the parent company of Telvent Miner & Miner) and others.
• Smart grid initiatives aimed at creating more-resilient, self-healing distribution networks and deploying event avoidance functions are pushing the integration of traditional OMSs with distribution network operation and control automation systems (such as automatic reclosing and advanced distribution protection). Governmental funding of smart grid projects has helped vendors and utilities collaborate on specific requirements. OMS vendors are now focusing on building these smart grid features into their production systems. Intergraph formed a partnership with Siemens to integrate intelligent grid control functionality into its OMS distribution dispatch offering. Oracle announced a partnership with S&C Electric, and CGI announced a partnership with Cooper Power Systems — both were intended to better integrate OMS and DMS applications with substation and distribution automation systems.
• Utilities have increasing needs to coordinate outage restoration efforts with public emergency/crisis management organizations. Several high-profile commission inquiries into utility restoration practices in recent years highlighted this concern. U.S. Department of Homeland Security requirements for better coordination of emergency response have also required more rigor of utilities. Intergraph, whose product originally addressed public-sector disaster management needs, and LET Systems (recently acquired by Trimble), whose product was designed for managing events in water and storm water networks, are both well-positioned to address coordination with public emergency organizations.
• As mentioned above, AMI functionality is being leveraged by both DMS and OMS applications. AMI can provide information that is useful for outage detection, inferencing, restoration and reporting. Smart meters can provide the OMS with new "nerve endings" through outage notifications. Customer service representatives and dispatchers can "ping" meters to verify restoration or to improve the performance of the inference engine. During restoration, aggregation of load data from interval meters can make it possible to calculate very accurately the reserve capacity for automatic switch plan generation. (It should be noted that this may be less useful as more-accurate network models and real-time distribution load flow applications are implemented.) Finally, during reliability analysis and reporting, AMI integration will provide time-stamped event histories, leading to more-granular reliability reporting capability. Other side benefits will accrue, such as asset-management-related analysis (for example, transformer thermal loading calculations and capacity constraint analysis) or loss (that is, diversion/theft) detection for customer service.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant concept is based on a customer-oriented market analysis. It is consistent with the approach espoused by business author Geoffrey Moore that a market is "a set of actual or potential customers for a given set of products or services who have a common set of needs or wants, and who reference each other when making a decision".

Accordingly, the OMS market comprises distribution utilities worldwide (primarily electric utilities, but also gas and water utilities), which are looking for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions, as well as related hardware, integration and support services, to improve responsiveness and communications (to the workforce, customers and media) in the emergency work management and network operations management areas. OMS functionality extends across distribution field operations, work management and asset management into the specific customer service area of outage information management.

Core OMS requirements are:

• Tools for maintaining the network topology/connectivity model and specific customer connections (including quality assurance/quality control) to perform outage determination and call center interaction with customers
• Methods for two-way interaction with customer information systems (CISs) to receive customer outage tickets and provide customer-specific outage information to call centers, or interactive voice response (IVR) systems to provide specific outage updates to affected customers, as well as to provide callback functions to validate restoration status
• Ability to interface with real-time network operation devices via SCADA and/or an automated meter reading (AMR) system or an AMI to obtain switching operation status or "last gasp" information from AMI meters, and use it for a callback function
• Methods to systematically manage and maintain real-time network model changes and safety tagging and clearance processes (sometimes called "electronic wallboards")
• Ability to interface with mobile workforce management (MWM) and work management systems to assign work crews to restoration jobs
• Ability to act as a database of record for switching operations, and provide a reporting environment for distribution reliability indexes

To be included in this category, software products must cater to the majority of the utility outage management functional requirements described above.

Worldwide, more than 20 vendors address utility needs for outage management through a variety of product/solution offerings. Many of these vendors are too small, in terms of company size or product scope, or they have too small a geographic reach to be of interest to Gartner clients. For this reason, we evaluated only the top eight products that are marketed globally, with an estimated license fee revenue threshold of $1 million generated during the past 12 months. OMS vendors must have had systems in production at more than four utility clients for more than one year. The combined customer base must serve more than 1 million utility end-user customers (that is, meters/services).

Products must be marketed as stand-alone utility OMS applications, although some of them are also offered as a part of an overall utility suite.

Distribution SCADA companies such as ACS and SNC-Lavalin are providing some OMS functionality in their DMS applications, but they do not yet meet all the inclusion criteria to be included in this study. Products used to manage and coordinate planned outage activities in the transmission and generation domain, such as those provided by Nexant/Equinox Software Design, Open Access Technology International (OATI) or Sun-Net Consulting, are not considered in this market analysis. They address different needs of transmission asset operators such as independent system operators (ISOs), regional transmission organizations (RTOs) or transmission system operators (TSOs).

No new vendors were added in this year's research. However, LET Systems has been acquired by Trimble and is featured under Trimble in 2010.

No vendors were dropped.

Product/service, overall viability, marketing execution and customer experience get the highest weights. This is because many utilities had been quick to buy OMSs in the past only to realize their data and related business processes would take years to get in shape to run or, worse, they would spend their project resources being beta testers for an early product version. That would cause further delays, cost overruns and overall frustration.

Offering strategy gets the highest weight. This includes system architecture and functional development strategy alignment to where the market is going.

Leaders are vendors that would normally be included in the shortlists for OMS products for all types of utilities worldwide. They perform profitably, grow their revenue and have a presence in all major markets. Their functionality is above average, and their technology and scalability are "leading edge." These vendors would be followed and tracked by other OMS vendors. Leaders in this market have paired advanced technology with broad offerings or rich functionality. Additionally, they have demonstrated the financial viability needed to fuel R&D to support new technology requirements (such as Web services and SOA) and transform integrated business processes.

Oracle Utilities continues its Leader status due to the combined effects of mature products, resulting in strong functional capability and a significant market share. Oracle continues to expand the functionality of its OMS by renewed R&D investment in leveraging its technology platform (integration platform and spatial engine). In addition, it is more tightly integrating it with other Oracle Utilities products, such as Customer Care and Billing, Mobile Workforce Management, and Meter Data Management, and adding functionality that moves the product toward an ADMS, such as integration with microgrids and automated fault restoration.

GE Energy's Leader status is based on its successful business and technical performance, which is attested to by storm-proven experience, and the large installed base. GE Energy's expertise in the area of operational technology (OT) — for example, energy management system (EMS)/SCADA and distribution automation (DA) — enables it to deliver more-advanced solutions that support IT or OT integration and smart grid functionality. GE increased its focus on smart grid initiatives, and AMI integration adds functionality to an already functionally rich and mature OMS product.

These vendors perform well in their selected markets or industries. Although they have high capability and performance (in terms of sales and growth), they may not be targeting all segments or geographies of the energy utility industry, or they may have a more limited vision of their functionality or technology. Clients with a conservative approach to business, or those with existing partnerships with these vendors, will find lower-risk options in this sector.

ABB continues to leverage its history of performance with large systems and combines its broader understanding of the network-engineering issues and OT background for real-time control systems. This aligns ABB with market requirements in the North American and EMEA markets, and it is an attractive solution for companies that are interested in using the same tool to manage distribution and subtransmission network operation.

Intergraph continues this year in the Challengers quadrant, based on its good sales execution, combined with a focus on smart grid functionality and improved vertical functionality of the product, which originated as a horizontal emergency response tool.

These vendors have unique functional or technical offerings, but their capabilities in geographic or financial terms are constrained. Visionaries are characterized by the ability to anticipate market transformation, such as increased analytical functionality or integration, as well as optimization for commodity and service management business processes. Clients who have a tolerance for risk and are seeking a differentiating product should consider the vendors in the Visionaries quadrant.

None of the vendors in this year's OMS market assessment has achieved Visionary status.

Vendors that are in the Niche Players quadrant for this market are worthy of consideration. Given the size of the market, potential buyers should consider that being listed on this Magic Quadrant is a good indication of vendor/product credibility. Nevertheless, vendors in the Niche Players quadrant are located there because of a geographical shortfall; narrower focus (such as Milsoft's focus on small municipal and rural cooperative markets); lack of financial strength (that is, they have not achieved financial viability compared with the market leaders); or the fact that they have not come as far as the Leaders in advancing their technologies or functionality. This prevents them from being universally suitable for all energy and utility customers. Clients should review carefully these vendors' target markets and capabilities, and they should include them in evaluations if the vendors match their business scope, size and specific needs.

The Niche Players are:

• Trimble
• Milsoft Utility Solutions
• Telvent Miner & Miner
• CGI

• ABB continues in its Challenger position in 2010 due to the good functionality of its OMS product (based on its broad understanding of network engineering and real-time control system expertise) and strong performance with large, Tier 1 utility customers that have track records of managing major outage events.
• Network Manager DMS integrates a number of applications (such as simulation, short-circuit fault location, automatic restoration switching plan generation, balanced/unbalanced load flow and automatic schematic generation), providing an appealing offering to utilities in North America and EMEA alike. In addition, Network Manager DMS complements Network Manager SCADA/EMS, which can provide utilities with a more integrated environment for managing transmission and distribution systems.
• ABB was an early adopter of off-the-shelf publish/subscribe technology and has leveraged its expertise in CIM in the EMS domain to develop a CIM-based interface between GIS and OMS.
• ABB is working with technology solution providers such as Silver Spring Networks and Elster to foster the convergence of AMI, distribution SCADA and DA into a "smart grid technology platform."

• ABB continues to deliver Network Manager as a leveraged product (by customizing code during the implementation and leveraging it for the next engagement) rather than as a COTS product. Some clients found that sole sourcing of the product implementation and customization to ABB to be more expensive than the alternatives.
• Customers looking for technology platform innovation, including SOA, will find that, while ABB uses an SOA framework for its internal application integration (for example, SCADA and switching orders), it offers few external services at this point (AMI and automatic vehicle location [AVL] integration). Other interfaces leverage traditional APIs.
• Based on the feedback from some ABB clients, utilities that are looking to meet their specific needs through customization may find that ABB's responsiveness does not fully meet their expectations.
• Clients looking for a thin-client graphical user interface (GUI) that can be easily deployed to a large number of users for a major event management functionality won't find ABB's offering to be in line with most competitors' solutions.

• As an early entrant in the OMS market, CGI PragmaLINE has evolved into a mature product with a proven history of performance with large, Tier 1 utility clients that have successfully managed major outage events with its OMS, as well as with small cooperatives with fewer than 50,000 customers.
• CGI has solid interfaces with its MWM tools and provides a certified interface with leading software products, such as with SAP IS-U/CR&B, for customer service integration.
• CGI has developed specific modules that enable modeling of the transmission network and substations, making PragmaLINE applicable for use with multiple voltage levels and network structures.
• CGI is a professional services organization with high software development maturity. Thus, it can be appropriate for customers looking to extend product functionality through significant custom development.

• CGI has placed emphasis on the tight integration of its MWM tool, which may detract potential OMS clients that already have or desire to acquire other vendors' MWM solutions. However, CGI provides potential OMS clients that have or desire other MWM solutions the same APIs (and related documentation) used for the CGI MWM interface, and therefore, it is capable of similar functionality.
• Although CGI is working on a new SOA that will integrate OMS with computer-aided dispatch (CAD), DMS and power analysis, PragmaLINE does not offer an SOA-based integration with an enterprise service platform.
• Customers that desire advanced analytical capability or tighter integration with DA (or fault location indicator devices) will not find it in the current CGI PragmaLINE OMS.
• Despite usability improvements that CGI has done over the past few years, some clients still feel that usability appears be sacrificed to functionality.

• GE Energy's PowerOn has the largest installed base and has been tested with the largest storm-proven call volume capacity of all the OMSs evaluated (it has a tested capacity of 200,000 trouble calls per hour and more than 100,000 trouble calls per hour proven in actual storm conditions).
• Although PowerOn utilizes its own GIS platform components, it has also developed good interfaces to other GISs, which has allowed it to expand its addressable market outside of the GE Smallworld customer base.
• GE Energy has a strong utility engineering and asset management business knowledge, as well as a solid background in OT (for example, EMS/SCADA and DA), to deliver more-advanced solutions that support IT and OT integration and smart grid (AMI) functionality.
• PowerOn's Web-based user interface supports decentralized dispatch operation, and as such, it is an appropriate solution for large energy companies that use a distributed environment during storm restoration.

• GE Energy has not clearly differentiated the PowerOn OMS from the Enmac DMS. However, product consolidation has progressed to combine the two products into one ADMS solution in PowerOnFusion.
• GE Energy's decision to adopt Oracle Spatial as a future GIS base creates platform discontinuity, with a product road map uncertainty that may negatively affect its customer technology strategy. Although this is a positive move for a more robust technology architecture that supports SOA, there will be a period of uncertainty while specific development plans get sorted out during the next few years.
• Because PowerOn is currently built on GE Energy's proprietary Smallworld GIS platform, customers may require more-specialized IT resources for support — especially if they are not users of Smallworld GIS.
• Some clients have expressed concerns regarding both the quality of the software and "bug fixing" procedures.

• Intergraph continues to offer strong OMS functionality that leverages more-open architecture and middleware standards, which has resulted in a strong sales performance during the past few years. Intergraph's OMS shares its core technology with its public safety emergency response computer-aided dispatch systems, which have been widely implemented globally.
• Intergraph provides out-of-the-box integration to its mobile workforce and crew-scheduling tools that can speed up implementation.
• Intergraph has responded to smart grid initiatives and is now repositioning InService to be a hub of an integrated smart grid control environment to improve situational awareness and reduce operator error.
• InService OMS customers give Intergraph high marks for ease of use and intuitive user interfaces, and they report a high level of satisfaction with Intergraph's support and professional services organizations.

• Because the InService open solution offers prepackaged integration with its own MWM and crew-scheduling tools, clients having other MWM products may find achieving comparable functionality and integration more challenging.
• InService shares the Intergraph incident management product architecture across several markets, including public safety, security and emergency response, and smart grid. Consequently, Intergraph's market success in other areas may put a strain on technical resources focused on adding a smart grid vertical functionality, which may impact the implementation duration and budget.
• Although Intergraph placed an increased focus on smart grid needs through collaborative work with several utility clients and partner alliances (such as Siemens Energy and eMeter), the product still lacks some of the advanced analytical capabilities that most competitors have added to their offerings.
• Intergraph does not support incremental updates of the network model. However, InService supports dual data configuration for minimal impact to production while updating the entire model.

• Milsoft's DisSPatch is based on and integrated with a fully detailed circuit model that tracks connectivity, leveraging the same topology model from its engineering analysis suite. DisSPatch accepts, analyzes and displays real-time input from SCADA, AMR and CIS. This also enables the use of operational network analysis tools to perform a variety of advanced what-if functions to minimize operational risk.
• Milsoft's sharp focus on U.S. cooperative and Tier 3 utility markets resulted in the largest number of utility OMS installations in this segment. Milsoft customers typically also use its feeder analysis applications.
• Milsoft is an industry leader in successfully implementing and promoting the MultiSpeak application integration standard developed by and for rural electric cooperatives.
• Milsoft has established good relationships with its consumers and is universally regarded as a responsive technology partner by its clients.

• The scalability requirements of its current market segment (electric cooperatives, public power systems and Tier 3 utilities) are unproven for larger utilities having very large storm-related call volumes (greater than 100,000 calls per hour). Milsoft's largest utility user has more than 200,000 end-user customers.
• DisSPatch offers partial support for handling low voltage, secondary looped networks and subtransmission, which most of the competitors focused on larger utilities fully support.
• A lack of global presence and experience limits Milsoft's ability to sell to and support utilities outside of the U.S.
• The product currently has a narrow focus both in markets (U.S. electric cooperatives and public power systems) and in functionality (electric companies).

• In addition to a rich feature and functionality set, significant installed base, and proven performance, Oracle Utilities as a part of a leading enterprise application vendor has managed to transform its delivery model from a leveraged custom product to a COTS solution. The focus on product development has shown an improvement in the quality of code, as reported by some clients.
• Network Management System is a component of an overall Oracle utility suite that addresses the need for revenue management, customer management, enterprise asset management and MWM, tied with common business intelligence (BI) tools. Customers looking for an integrated solution that addresses the need for business process improvements and optimization in large cross-functional utility areas may find Oracle Utilities' solution more attractive.
• Being part of a large technology provider that controls its own business process platform (Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Application Integration Architecture) and spatial processing technology (Oracle Spatial) should help Oracle Utilities gain additional performance improvement and attain technology platform leadership. As an example, Release 1.8.0 of Network Management System included the use of Oracle Fusion Middleware technology.
• Oracle Utilities Network Management System outage management component provides fully automated, closed-loop fault isolation and restoration control through integration with its fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) module.

• Some legacy Oracle Utilities Network Management System clients have reported a change in responsiveness, which they have attributed to changing product ownership from small vendors (CES-SPL WorldGroup) to a megavendor (Oracle). According to Oracle surveys, however, client satisfaction is trending up.
• Although Network Management System appears to be a key part of an application suite, which should contribute to a smart grid transformation (including CIS, AMI and MWM), the development activities appear to be trailing in an articulated, holistic smart grid strategy.
• While Oracle participates in CIM standards-setting activities, it has not yet delivered CIM-based data integration. However, CIM integration is on the road map for a future release.
• Oracle's implementation strategy includes greater use of external partners for product delivery and implementation. This has created issues with some clients who've found access to Oracle's technical resources and good technical documentation challenging.

• Telvent Miner & Miner continues to experience growth in the OMS market, which will increase the product's long-term viability.
• Responder is built on the ArcFM GIS data model hosted on ESRI's GIS platform, which can be offered on multiple operating systems and relational databases. Thus, users of the Telvent Miner & Miner application find high value. This is attributable to the integrated suite of products that it provides, which offer the ability to manage the electric system life cycle through design, build and operate (Designer, ArcFM and Responder).
• In addition to tight out-of-the-box integration with its design, engineering analysis, and mobile workforce and crew-scheduling applications, Telvent Miner & Miner includes integration with Telvent's DMS and OASyS SCADA products to address increased needs and to move toward an ADMS platform.
• Responder is one of the few OMS solutions that can meet the needs of electric, gas and water utilities for emergency restoration functionality.

• Although Responder delivers very good core functionality, most Telvent customers depend on Telvent's professional services for implementation and customization to meet specific requirements.
• Responder is hosted on ESRI GIS and depends on its native functionality for many common services. As such, the solution may be less attractive to clients who use other GIS platforms to manage spatial data. Telvent supports commercially available tools to load other GIS network connectivity data into the ESRI GIS platform for OMS network model updates.
• According to some clients, the support organization appears to be inadequately staffed (although it is perceived as friendly and useful).
• Implementation of the "Publish/Subscribe" (Pub/Sub) integration architecture, and keeping in sync with the underlying ESRI software platform, create a dependency, which some clients reported as the main cause for project overruns. The current Responder release (as of April 2010) has apparently removed the dependency on Pub/Sub.

• In addition to providing emergency restoration management in electric utilities, Trimble eRespond has addressed a niche market for water and wastewater utilities. It has a comprehensive set of features designed to simplify the end-to-end process of fault management in a water distribution network, from customer trouble call management — through workforce management and dispatching — to regulatory reporting.
• eRespond is built on a modern Java EE architecture from the ground up (no legacy elements) and has a zero-footprint Web browser client.
• eRespond supports open middleware standards, including CIM and enterprise service bus for Tibco Software, SeeBeyond (now owned by Oracle-Sun Microsystems) and webMethods (now owned by Software AG), and has achieved "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" certification.
• Customers find Trimble to be a responsive and knowledgeable organization that can contribute to business process improvement. The acquisition by Trimble has removed potential concern about LET Systems' corporate viability, as well as extended its global reach through the existing Trimble sales and support organization.

• eRespond provides a geographically referenced view (using the utility's own GIS or Google Maps) of the asset and events, but it requires the use of a schematic display for network operations. Some clients may find this less appealing, compared with other OMS vendors' geographically referenced user interfaces.
• Utilities desiring a DMS functionality will not find that with Trimble. Trimble customers desiring DMS should work with the company to leverage its partnerships with SCADA vendors to jointly develop DMS/OMS solutions.
• eRespond still does not have an implementation in the Americas, which limits its regional market understanding, although it can now leverage the Trimble UtilityCenter uaDispatch installed base to gain insight into North American OMS market.
• The Trimble acquisition has removed potential LET Systems' viability concerns. However, Trimble by itself does not possess a significant mind share in the utility software market.