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GE Energy, Fichtner IT Consulting work on new software

03/11/2008

Seattle, March 11 — GE Energy has entered into a strategic relationship with Fichtner IT Consulting, the IT competence center of the Fichtner group, Germany’s largest independent engineering company, to collaborate on the development of Smallworld Geoxtension, the latest product in GE’s Oracle Spatial-based, Web-enabled software solutions for network and asset management.

GE Energy has acquired the GeoXtension software and under the terms of this agreement, GE Energy and Fichtner will enhance Fichtner’s proven GeoXtension three-tier web client as a supported GE Energy product, integrated with GE’s Oracle-based Electric Utility Office environment.

The scope of the collaboration includes the development of the web client platform for GE Energy’s Smallworld Electric Office powered by Oracle, a standards-based geospatial asset management solution for customers who hold network and asset data in Oracle Spatial, which will extend the reach of geospatial data throughout the enterprise.

"Companies worldwide are under growing pressure to lower their cost of ownership for IT infrastructure, including geospatial deployment. To address this trend, GE Energy recently announced its strategy to develop standard, open, geospatial applications based on Oracle Spatial for utilities and telecommunications companies,” said Bob Gilligan, general manager of GE Energy’s transmission and distribution business. “In collaboration with Fichtner, we are combining our wealth of experience and knowledge to deliver a solution that will allow customers to gain a competitive advantage through asset management solutions based on industry standards.”

To better serve customers interested in exploiting geospatial data through an Oracle Spatial repository, GE Energy will make available early releases of the web client software, providing the opportunity for customers to immediately prototype solutions on this established state-of-the-art technology. The new software product is expected to be available to utility and telecom customers in the second quarter of 2008.
GE Energy is a certified partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork.