Data integration challenges for standards-compliant mobile applications

Modern mobile devices are capable of running sophisticated, network-enabled applications exploiting a variety of sensors on a single low-cost piece of hardware. The electrical industry can benefit from these new platforms to automate existing processes and provide engineers and field crew with access to large amounts of complex data in real-time, anywhere in the world. The development of a standards-based application decouples the mobile client application from a single vendor or existing enterprise system, but requires a complex data integration architecture to support the use and exploitation of large amounts of data spread across multiple existing systems. The integration with a mobile application introduces new challenges when dealing with remote devices where data network communications cannot be relied on, especially under storm conditions, and the devices themselves are at risk of being lost or stolen. Addressing these challenges offers the potential to improve data quality, enable access to accurate, up-to-date information in the field and ultimately save a utility time and money.