This started off as a side project and later became a major product that is sold by Intergraph today. Intergraph, with over 4000 employees at the time, provided solutions for electric, gas, water, utility, & communication companies worldwide. When I first met my coworker Mike Baker he had a lot of good ideas. He was with the company for much longer than me and so he knew the domain inside and out. He also understood the gaps our company products had. One of those gaps at the time was a performing thin client for managing power outages. Mike Baker had written the original OMS portal but understood that the performance issues were due the lack of web services being used. The map was essentially redrawn whenever the view moved or changed. The old version was ahead of its time for power companies but in the software industry was definitely not up to par.
Mike shared with me his vision and an OpenLayers prototype and I got to work. Most of the work was done in between onsite implementations. A lot of time was spent on the airplane or back at the hotel. Eventually we had a working product and quite a few of our customers were interested.
I personally got to implement it to some big utility companies and get their feedback for enhancements.
- Wisconsin Public Service (WPS)
- Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD)
- Lafayette Utility System (LUS)
- Northwestern Energy
- Westar Energy
- Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA)
The product is still being implemented today. You can see the product card here: