Dive Summary:

• GTM Research has released a report titled "The Soft Grid 2013-2020: Big Data & Utility Analytics for Smart Grid" that predicts that cumulative global spending on power utility data analytics will cost $3.8 billion globally by 2020.
• The report goes on to predict that U.S. utilities alone will spend nearly $100 per home in grid operations and consumer-related analytics over the next nine years.
• Data technologies such as predicting analytics and open-source data management platforms are driving growth in the soft grid, leading to cost improvements and enhanced performance.

From the article:

Driving growth of the utility soft grid are data technologies, ranging from open-source data management platforms like Hadoop, to massively parallel processing (MPP) big data appliances, to predictive analytics now catching fire in every industry, to the cost improvements and enhanced performance of underlying data storage and infrastructure layer.

Supporting this technology shift is a rich ecosystem of vendors. While the biggest names in IT are positioning themselves to be at the head of the class, it is becoming apparent that there will be several seminal companies that will be launched in this soft grid space, to which utilities will look for new products and services. ...