When The Lights Go Out, Systems Must Work Together
By Ashwini Nagendra Prasad, HEXstream solutions engineering manager
Utility outages are inevitable. What defines performance isn’t if outages happen—it’s how effectively the organization responds.
During a major outage, customers don’t care about OMS vs. CIS or AMI vs. ADMS or back-end system boundaries. They care about accurate information, fast restoration, and clear communication. That’s where integration architecture quietly becomes mission-critical.
Business reality
Outages are moments of truth. Call volumes spike. Customer trust is on the line. Operations teams need a single, reliable view of the grid. Leadership and regulators expect clarity and control.
We’ve seen that even with modern operational systems in place, utilities struggle—not because systems fail, but because they don’t work together in real time.
The integration challenge exposed by outages
During outage events, common integration gaps surface quickly. Status updatescan lag across systems. Batch and polling-based integrations call fall behind. Point-to-point dependencies can create cascading failures, all while different systems tell different stories.
The result is confusion, manual workarounds, and delayed decisions exactly when speed matters most.
The architecture shift
Outage response isn’t a system problem. It’s a coordination problem.
Modern integration architectures enable:
- Event-driven communication instead of polling
- Real-time propagation of outage and restoration events
- Loose coupling so systems scale and fail independently
- A shared operational truth across customer, field and control systems
When an outage is declared or restored, every system should know at the same time—not minutes or hours later.
The architecture principle
Smart uilities design integrations for event-driven collaboration, not system ownership. Consider how outages unfold as business events—the outage is detected, the crew is assigned, restoration times are estimated and, ultimately, power gets restored
The best integration strategies should reflect that reality—enabling systems to react, not wait. During outages, technology should reduce complexity—not add to it. Integration architecture determines whether systems collaborate seamlessly or operate in silos when it matters most.
In the utilities domain, integration isn’t middleware. It isn’t plumbing. It’s a reliability enabler. We at HEXstream believe that when the lights go out, integration architecture determines whether systems succeed by collaborating—or fail by competing.