Windows Azure AppFabric
Customer Solution Case Study
Azure AppFabric Service Bus Enables Smart
Grid Energy Savings for Manufacturers
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Invensys Operations Management is a
leading provider of automation and
information technologies, systems,
software solutions, services, and
consulting to global manufacturing and
infrastructure industries. Based in Plano,
Texas, Invensys has 9,000 employees.
Business Situation
The company required a scalable, secure
way to enable two-way data exchange
between electric utilities and their
commercial customers to enable a smart
grid approach to power distribution.
Solution
Invensys has created a smart grid
solution using the Service Bus and Access
Control Service features of Windows
Azure AppFabric.
Benefits
 Optimization of energy use
 Interoperability with other systems
 Efficient data delivery with Service Bus
 Faster development, lower costs
 Massive scalability
“The Azure AppFabric Service Bus can provide a
valuable vehicle for expediting the implementation of
smart-grid technologies wherever needed.”
David Hardin, Staff Engineer, Invensys Operations Management
Invensys Operations Management, a leader in providing
manufacturing execution systems to industry, needed a smart
grid communications platform to provide real-time electricity
pricing data from utilities that could be integrated with metering
and automation systems on the factory floor. One barrier was
the reluctance of utilities—and their customers—to allow direct
Internet communication links to their IT systems. Invensys solved
the problem by incorporating the Service Bus and Access
Control Service features of Windows Azure AppFabric. Azure
AppFabric Service Bus provides a publish/subscribe platform
enabling two-way communication between utilities and
customers, without requiring direct endpoint connections. The
solution gives energy users real-time pricing information to
guide scheduling of energy-intensive industrial processes, and
helps utilities reduce spikes in demand.
“Within industrial
settings we know there
will soon be millions of
devices . . . Depending
on the flexibility of the
manufacturing
processes, devices can
schedule themselves to
operate during periods
of lower-demand, and
hence lower-cost
electricity.”
Paul Forney, System Architect,
Invensys Operations Management
Situation
The once staid fields of electrical
generation, distribution, and consumption
have sprung to greater prominence in
recent years with the advent of smart grids
and smart meters to help all parties
involved make better decisions about
power usage. A smart grid refers to the
digital technology being built into power
distribution systems to provide massive
data that can be used in a spectrum of
ways to provide greater efficiency and
reliability, as well as to support pricing
models that encourage non-peak usage.
Smart meters refer to a new generation of
digital technology that give users real-time
or near-real-time usage information,
including—especially within industrial
settings—detailed information on the
quantity of power used, and the quality of
power supplied.
The combination of smart grids, smart
meters, and related systems promises to
open new potential for energy conservation
around the world. Invensys Operations
Management is a leading provider of
automation and information technology,
systems, software, computer-based
hardware, and consulting for the global
manufacturing and infrastructure industries.
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, its solutions
are used by more than 40,000 customers
around the world with more than 200,000
plants and facilities. The company has
approximately 9,000 employees and is a
division of London-based Invensys, which
makes industrial and railway control
systems.
Smart meter deployments around the
world are measured in the tens of millions,
and industry analysts predict the number
will soar past 100 million within the next
few years. While much of the adoption is
driven by utilities upgrading residential
meters to encourage conservation,
industrial operations have also been quick
to see the value of combining a smart grid
with smart meters to reduce electrical
usage and—by incorporating pricing
data—reduce expenditures on electricity
through scheduling use at non-peak times
whenever possible.
“Within industrial settings we know there
will soon be millions of devices, as one
plant could have dozens or hundreds of
monitoring devices throughout their
operations,” says Paul Forney, System
Architect at Invensys Operations
Management. “Each of these devices will
need pricing information. That’s the beauty
of what can be done with connecting smart
devices with the smart grid. Depending on
the flexibility of the manufacturing
processes, devices can schedule themselves
to operate during periods of lowerdemand, and hence lower-cost electricity.”
Another benefit is that industrial
operations, with the right pricing
information, will be able to pick the best
time to sell to the grid excess electricity
they can produce from their own power
generation facilities. The key to such
solutions is the ability to freely exchange
information. Invensys needed to create a
smart grid communications platform, but
faced the challenge of how to support the
data exchange, especially with securityminded utilities—and their equally securityminded commercial customers—that are
resistant to opening up Internet
communication ports.
Yet another challenge was helping smaller
utilities overcome the hurdle of investing in
the IT infrastructure typically associated
with smart grid initiatives. The total power
grid in the United States, and in most other
places around the world, consists of a
patchwork of electricity producers and
distributors. With increasing interest in
developing new energy sources, such as
solar and wind, the number of grid
participants is expected to increase.
“Making smart grid a reality has required
that utilities have a significant
computational capacity to receive,
calculate, and rebroadcast pricing data to
the constituents,” says David Hardin, Staff
Engineer at Invensys Operations
Management. “We want to help utilities—
and their customers—participate in a smart
grid right away without having to wait
years or making large capital investments.”
Solution
Smart Solution - Energy pricing
information from the utility
is combined with metering
data within the
manufacturing plant to
facilitate the smart grid
solution.
Invensys has taken a step into the future by
deploying a smart grid and smart metering
solution in an industrial setting. Invensys is
working with what it describes as a “very
large manufacturing company with global
operations” to deploy a pilot project. The
first phase of the project, being deployed
now, involves placing smart meters within
one of the customer’s large manufacturing
plants, and providing a smart grid solution
to the electrical utility that supplies power
to the plant.
The Invensys solution delivers pricing
information downstream from the utility to
the manufacturing plant. Prices are
automatically updated every time a price
change occurs, which in unregulated power
distribution markets can be as frequent as
every 5 minutes or less. Price change
information is consumed by Invensys
metering equipment throughout the plant,
which uses Invensys Wonderware
manufacturing execution system (MES)
software.
The Invensys solution also measures
variation in the quality of the power
delivered, as spikes in power intensity can
disrupt equipment or processes.
Automated onsite monitoring enables a
manufacturer to verify whether service level
agreements (SLAs) with electric utilities
have been met.
A key component of the Invensys solution
is its use of Windows Azure AppFabric
Service Bus to enable an Internet-based
neutral container to which utilities can
publish pricing data, and to which
customers can subscribe. This enables
distribution of near-real-time pricing
information without either party having to
open their IT infrastructures to direct
endpoint connectivity—a major relief to
those charged with enforcing digital
security. Azure AppFabric Access Control
Service enforces user authentication. The
solution stores pricing, MES data, and other
information using Microsoft SQL Azure, a
relational database for Internet-based, or
cloud computing.
The company sees use of the Windows
Azure platform as greatly reducing the cost
of entry for utilities and commercial
customers seeking the benefits of smart
“Our cloud-based
solution uses the Service
Bus feature and the
Access Control Service
feature of Azure
AppFabric to enable
utilities to publish pricing
information onto a fabric
that can be securely
subscribed to by smart
devices."
Paul Forney, System Architect,
Invensys Operations Management
grid participation. Rather than having to
build and manage dedicated data centers,
organizations can simply subscribe to the
cloud-based Invensys services.
“There are a limited number of utilities, but
hundreds of thousands of manufacturing
plants that have huge energy bills each
month and could benefit from using realtime pricing information to optimize their
energy management,” says Forney. “Our
cloud-based solution uses the Service Bus
feature and the Access Control Service
feature of Azure AppFabric to enable
utilities to publish pricing information onto
a fabric that can be securely subscribed to
by smart devices. This frees industrial
customers from having to expose
endpoints for subscription callbacks which,
for security purposes, most are reluctant to
do.”
Invensys works with the Open Access
Same-Time Information System (OASIS),
the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), and other organizations
to help guide development of a standardsbased smart grid.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA)
cloud-based solution Invensys is deploying
in its pilot project contains a number of
design elements, including:

Service Bus. Invensys uses the Service
Bus feature of Windows Azure AppFabric
to provide a neutral messaging relay
space to enable connectivity across trust
boundaries. The Azure AppFabric Service
Bus makes it easy to connect
applications over the Internet. Services
that register on the Service Bus can easily
be discovered and accessed across
virtually any network topology. “The
Azure AppFabric Service Bus solves some
very important problems,” Hardin says.
“Usually with a notification technology,
you have to worry about getting around
inbound ports that are guarded by
firewalls. Also, for some IP addresses, you
have to use network address translation
stations to get to devices. These barriers
make it difficult to send messages from
one machine to another. The Service Bus
solved these problems for us because we
can send messages without worrying
about closed inbound ports.”
 Access Control. Invensys uses the Access
Control Service feature of Windows
Azure AppFabric to extend identity
information to users of the Service Bus.
The Azure AppFabric Access Control
Service provides authorization services
for applications connecting over the
Internet. It provides an easy way to
control Web applications and services
while integrating with standards-based
identity providers. Authorization
decisions can be pulled out of the
application and placed in a set of rules
that can transform incoming security
claims into claims that applications
understand.
 Publish and subscribe. Invensys uses
the Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) to support the publish
and subscribe model within the Service
Bus. WCF supports publish and subscribe
connectivity through a directory
structure based on URLs. This
technology, coupled with Azure
AppFabric Access Control Service,
provides a scalable infrastructure that
can technically support the secure
delivery of dynamic pricing information,
down to five-minute pricing updates,
from the wholesale markets to
manufacturers and other consumers on a
massive scale.
 Application server. The Invensys
application server receives continually
updated pricing information from the
utility as well as data from Invensys
Wonderware System Platform which
“The Azure AppFabric
Service Bus and Access
Control Service are
features that we feel are
unmatched in other
cloud offerings.”
David Hardin, Staff Engineer,
Invensys Operations Management
provides real-time operations
management software to enable
customers to synchronize their
production operations with business
objectives. Plant engineers can work
directly with the Invensys application
server from the dashboard interface of
the application, using pricing
information, for example, to schedule
energy-intensive operations. The SOA
design also supports programmatic
control so tasks can be self-scheduling,
depending upon electricity pricing and
other criteria. For plants with
supplemental power generation
capabilities, the application can schedule
the optimum times for selling electricity
back to the grid. The application tracks
when processes were run, applies the
electrical rates that were in force, and
gives an exact energy cost.
 Cloud database. Organizations not
wanting to manage their database locally
can use a cloud-based data store using
SQL Azure, part of the Windows Azure
platform that provides a full relational
database. SQL Azure can also be used as
an aggregation point for organizations
with multiple facilities that store data
onsite. Information from local databases
can be brought together in the cloud to
enable enterprise-wide analytics. The
large manufacturer Invensys is working
with for the current project will transfer
on-premises data to the SQL Azure
database which supports a dashboard for
plant engineers and others interacting
with the information.
 Local database. The Invensys design
includes the option for organizations to
store data on premises using Microsoft
SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise database
software running on the Windows Server
2008 R2 Enterprise operating system, in
addition to using SQL Azure. Locally
stored data can be analyzed for historical
and trending information to gain insights
into reducing electricity needs for
different manufacturing operations.
 Dashboard interface. Invensys used the
Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in to
create a graphical user interface for
interacting with its smart grid
application.
The combination of the Azure AppFabric
Service Bus and Access Control Service
proved to be a winning combination as
Invensys explored its options for
developing and deploying its smart grid
solution. “We evaluated Amazon EC2 and
Google cloud products, but no one had
anything comparable to the Azure
AppFabric Service Bus,” Hardin says. “The
Service Bus has the functionality,
interoperability, and scalability required to
provide a communications infrastructure
that can be used for large-scale smart grid
applications. The Azure AppFabric Service
Bus and Access Control Service are features
that we feel are unmatched in other cloud
offerings.”
Benefits
The smart grid communications platform
Invensys was able to create using Azure
AppFabric technology will enable its
industrial customers to achieve
optimization of energy use, and
interoperability with other systems, while
benefiting from efficient data delivery.
Invensys has enjoyed faster development
and lower costs by incorporating Azure
AppFabric into its design, while its
customers benefit from the massive
scalability the solution provides.
Optimization of Energy Use
Invensys sees the Service Bus and Access
Control Service features of Windows Azure
AppFabric as significant tools in helping its
customers realize the smart-grid promise of
optimizing energy use. Combining Invensys
Wonderware monitoring information with
“The general movement
of the price of energy
seems to be upward, and
the higher the costs go,
the bigger the rewards
will be from optimizing
energy use."
Bill Schiel, Industry Solution Manager,
Invensys Operations Management
smart grid pricing data through the Azure
AppFabric Service Bus will help customers
reduce their energy costs by giving them
the information required to better plan
when to launch energy-intensive processes.
The solution also provides savings by
flagging the best times to reduce electrical
use (sometimes referred to as energy
shedding), and identifying the optimal
times to sell back into the grid any excess
energy a plant creates on its own from a
co-generation infrastructure including
diesel power plants, solar power, wind
generation, or other sources.
“We think this is a very important market to
be in,” says Bill Schiel, Industry Solution
Manager at Invensys. “The general
movement of the price of energy seems to
be upward, and the higher the costs go, the
bigger the rewards will be from optimizing
energy use. Some plants have a relatively
constant energy demand, but in many
cases there is sufficient flexibility to
schedule energy-intensive operations for
low-demand, and hence, lower-cost, hours.
With some operations spending $1 million
or more a month for electric power, even a
3 percent savings through optimization
adds up.”
As more organizations create their own
power generation solutions, there will be
increased interest in determining the
optimal time to sell electricity back into the
grid. “Many operations already have
backup generators,” Forney says. “And if an
operation has warehouses covering acres of
ground, with solar panels on the roofs, they
may want to maximize the value of the
power they sell into the grid by day and
move as much of their energy-intensive
operations as possible to the night.”
Interoperability with Other Systems
Invensys sees the benefits of its smart grid
solution being magnified the more deeply
an organization integrates the information
with its other operations, including the MES
solutions that Invensys develops and
deploys using the Microsoft Application
Platform, and enterprise resource planning
(ERP) solutions that customers have in
place.
Of course, manufacturers can’t schedule
operations solely on the basis of the cost of
energy, as they need to satisfy orders, deal
with backlogs, maintain inventory, and
respond to other real-world pressures. But
combining smart-grid data with ERP
ordering information, and linking this with
manufacturing execution systems could
enable a deeper degree of interoperability
that could result in lower energy costs
while retaining optimal productivity.
“The ERP system dictates when a
manufacturer needs to build automatic
transmissions, for example, to fill an order,”
Forney says. “Incorporating costing
information from the utility can enable the
manufacturing execution systems to
schedule something like the energydemanding extrusion process to be
accomplished during hours when energy
was at a lower cost.”
The same kind of interoperability could
enable a system to delay the beginning of a
complex manufacturing process if
information from the smart grid indicated
that demand was so high that a brown-out
could occur, which could interrupt the
process, causing the loss of all the raw
materials.
“If someone makes an error and runs a big
process that's energy intensive at the
wrong time, they could basically kill the
profit they were going to be making on
that product run,” Forney says. “This sort of
energy management—tied to dynamic
pricing information that we're getting from
“We are using Azure
AppFabric to create realworld solutions for
today, and we are using
the same tools to create
the energy solutions that
will be needed in the
future.”
Bill Schiel, Industry Solution Manager,
Invensys Operations Management
the independent system operators, as well
as qualitative information on anticipated
power supplies—combined with needs
from MES and ERP systems, could have a
big impact. Imagine if every plant had 500
meters monitoring all different aspects of a
process and each of these meters had
connectivity to Azure AppFabric to pull
down their pricing information and do their
calculations and then send the information
over to their SQL Azure databases. Invensys
already makes intelligent manufacturing
execution systems. Adding smart-grid
information and ERP data will make them
even more intelligent.”
Looking ahead, Schiel notes, “We are using
Azure AppFabric to create real-world
solutions for today, and we are using the
same tools to create the energy solutions
that will be needed in the future.”
Efficient Data Delivery with Service Bus
The Azure AppFabric Service Bus proved to
be exactly the solution that Invensys
needed because it enables data transfer
without having to expose endpoints on
either the utility’s side or the
manufacturer’s side. The solution also
enables smaller utilities to immediately
deploy smart-grid solutions without having
to invest in the creation and management
of data centers.
“Utilities and their industrial customers all
have stringent IT security measures in
place,” Forney says. “Whether it is a
nuclear-powered utility on one side or a
chemical plant on the other, no one wants
to expose endpoints to enable services to
cross the firewall. A virtual private network
(VPN) couldn’t really replace what the
Azure AppFabric Service Bus does because
a VPN opens a network to everything on
the other end of the tunnel. Another
alternative would be pinging an outgoing
response service, but if that one endpoint is
being pinged by millions of devices, you
run into scalability problems in a hurry. The
enhanced security provided by our
approach to deployment is one of the
reasons the Azure AppFabric Service Bus is
so important to us.”
The efficiency of the Azure AppFabric
Service Bus could help open the doors to
smart grid solutions throughout the
industry. “The Azure AppFabric Service Bus
can provide a valuable vehicle for
expediting the implementation of smartgrid technologies wherever needed,”
Hardin says. “It can be accessed widely and
securely, paid for as used, and expanded as
needed. It provides the security,
interoperability, and performance required
for large-scale smart grid applications, at a
significantly lower cost than building data
centers.”
Faster Development, Lower Costs
Invensys says that using the Azure
AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control
Service not only lowered its development
costs, but made the solution possible in the
first place. “Without the Azure AppFabric
Service Bus, we might not even have
tackled this project,” Hardin says. “Building
an Internet-based service bus with this
capability and performance would have
been a monumental development
challenge and expense costing hundreds of
thousands of dollars.”
Massive Scalability
Using the Azure AppFabric Service Bus as
their communications highway, utilities
using the Invensys solution can easily scale
their smart grid infrastructure to keep pace
with need. “The Service Bus has massive
scalability at very reasonable costs and can
elastically scale up or down as need
demands,” Hardin says. “There’s no physical
on-premises infrastructure to deploy or
depreciate, and a utility can bump up
"We benefit from the
fact that, because our
solution incorporates
Azure AppFabric and
other parts of the Azure
platform, Microsoft is the
one responsible for
keeping the services up
and running, secure, upto-date, scalable, and
available."
Paul Forney, System Architect,
Invensys Operations Management
capacity on demand, paying only for the
communications traffic that they use.”
The company sees scalability—and
reliability—benefits in the fact that
Microsoft hosts the Windows Azure
platform that supports Azure AppFabric
and SQL Azure.
“We require the scalability and reliability to
supply information to an ever-growing
number of subscribers,” Forney says. “We
need scalability, robustness, and the ability
to offer whatever SLAs might be required.
We benefit from the fact that, because our
solution incorporates Azure AppFabric and
other parts of the Azure platform, Microsoft
is the one responsible for keeping the
services up and running, secure, up-todate, scalable, and available. That’s a whole
lot of data center responsibility that we
don’t have to worry about.”
Summary
In summary, Invensys was able to create
the smart-grid communications platform it
needed, including the solution for securely
exchanging data between utilities and
commercial customers, by building its
solution using the Service Bus and Access
Control Service features of Azure
AppFabric.
For More Information
Windows Azure AppFabric
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com
Windows Azure AppFabric is a set of
application services focused on improving
the performance and management of
cloud-based applications. To deliver these
benefits, Windows Azure AppFabric
provides AppFabric Service Bus to provide
a neutral messaging relay space to enable
connectivity across trust boundaries, and
Access Control Service to extend identity
information to users of the Service Bus.
For more information about Windows
Azure AppFabric, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/appfabr
ic/
For more information about Invensys
Operations Management products and
services, visit the Web site at:
www.invensys.com
Software and Services

Windows Azure Platform
− Windows Azure AppFabric
− SQL Azure
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
Enterprise
− Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Hardware

This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2010

Technologies
− Microsoft Silverlight for Windows
− Windows Communication Foundation
Varies by customer