Görlitz - Energy Data Management

GÖRLITZ is a leading manufacturer of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and energy information management systems for the retrieval and management of energy data used in billing systems and fault monitoring. The company has more than 800 customers across Europe, mainly from the industrial and energy sectors, where they deploy GÖRLITZ’s hardware and software to record, transmit, collect and bill meter data for energy delivery and consumption.

Challenges

One of GÖRLITZ Austria’s core products is its Ethernet/GPRS router which connects electricity meters deployed in the field and allows customers to remotely collect energy usage data. 

GÖRLITZ Austria turned to Sierra Wireless to help meet its connectivity challenges. GÖRLITZ required an end-to-end solution to transmit data over a GPRS connection in order to communicate with electricity meters, based on highly reliable and robust industrial-grade hardware. Moreover, they wanted a platform that would enable application development to be as simple as possible.

Solution

Simple to deploy and future-proof

The Sierra Wireless solution combined the AirPrime™ Q2686 Embedded Wireless Module, the Open AT® Application Framework and the Developer Studio.

The combined hardware, application framework and development tools of Sierra Wireless ensure that deploying the Ethernet/GPRS router is as simple as possible. Teaming up with Sierra Wireless enabled GÖRLITZ to carry out smooth wireless connectivity integration to its solution and to focus on its core business, as a smart metering expert. GÖRLITZ could incorporate the module quickly and get its gateway to market quickly.

Cost effective

Sierra Wireless’ solution has helped reduce costs for GÖRLITZ both in terms of cost of deployment and cost of maintaining the routers. Through the streamlined development time enabled by the Open AT Application Framework, the use of its M2M operating system and software libraries within the module, the total cost of deployment was much lower than what competing solutions could offer.

Results

GÖRLITZ customers using its AMR routers are benefitting from having a single communications channel to interrogate meters and send the resulting information to their data centers for analysis. Sierra Wireless’ modules are helping GÖRLITZ achieve its aims of providing the most effective, reliable and feature-rich routers through:

• Secure and reliable wireless connectivity
• Robust technology proven in many energy industry deployments
• Fast deployment and cost-effective maintenance and support

Helmut Ratzenhofer concludes: “Sierra Wireless brought to bear its wide experience and expertise in the wireless and energy spaces to deliver us a solution that was easy to integrate and deploy and one that has provided us a platform to create new applications in the future.  When combined with our expertise in the smart metering space, we can provide our customers with a gateway that allows them to efficiently gather the intelligence and data they need for their businesses to succeed.”

To find out more about how Sierra Wireless can help with your smart metering communications needs, please visit our Energy Solutions page.