Who Will Own the Smart Grid Sector?

October 21, 2008 in cleantech, smart grid by mmiller | No comments

Greentech Media has a good overview of how the firm structure is beginning to shake out.  From the article:

Now, and increasingly in the future, EnerNoc is going to function more like a software and services company, said T.J. Glauthier, a director at the company during an open house at Foundation Capital yesterday. The company will provide demand management services to industrial clients and this middleware stack, as it were, will operate on top of equipment based around standardized protocols and hardware. In a sense, it will become a Salesforce.com or SAP of power consumption for industrialists. Similarly, eMeter can be looked at as a software-as-service (SaaS) company.
And who will make this industry-standard hardware? Silver Spring Networks, says Scott Lang, the company’s CEO. Silver Spring aims to be the Cisco of the grid (assuming Cisco doesn’t decide to become the Cisco of the grid itself.)

My question is — will Cisco stay on the sidelines as an industry partner, or will they buy Silver Spring within the next 18 months?  (This is not the first comparison between the two — see here.)  In my view, the infrastructure buildout necessary to really get the full AMI in place will effectively be the only way that we see a dawn of ubiquitous wi-fi and zigbee mesh computing.   Cisco knows that utilities can and will roll this out much more quickly than municipalities or the patchwork of cell and data providers.  They won’t sit this one out too much longer.   And once they own Silver Spring Networks, they’ll have a great position to acquire or at least leverage all of the industry partners that SSN has conveniently aggregated.

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