The August 14, 2003 blackout in the Northeastern part of the United States demonstrated the catastrophic effect of limitations on situational awareness within a control room. Further, it demonstrated that redundancy was not sufficient for problem identification and without identification, there is no resolution. As a result, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and some electric utility industry consultants have recommended that there needs to be more emphasis on situational awareness and to effectively do that, a true monitoring system needs to be implemented by an independent provider.

Primate Technologies, Inc. (P-Tech), even prior to the blackout, provided solutions to assist in control room operations. P-Tech assists by providing a service oriented architecture in the delivery of monitoring and visualization products, GridGuardian and BlackBoard. These products bind disparate systems into a seamless solution for operators to view the true state of a company, while also providing greater automation and visualization. With the capability to interface to many different systems, P-Tech’s solutions perform tasks independent from the individual systems currently in place. This solution eliminates the technology silo’s that can surface in organizations, and provides a single point to monitor the performance of the infrastructure and visualize the overall condition of all systems in real-time. P-Tech’s solution provides GridGuardian and BlackBoard to a customer and takes responsibility for all of the following tasks:

• monitoring servers & critical applications on all systems, including real-time control systems
• providing advanced alarming for situations across multiple systems
• effectively notifying users and operators of entire company situations through automated notifications and visualizations of data from multiple systems
• automatically notifying users of alarms, status, or deviations with delivery to any group or person
• escalating alert severities due to the length of time a situation is outstanding or due to a combination of mission critical information relayed from several real-time systems
• uniquely notifying each recipient by his preferred methods - email, voice mail, text message, etc.
• automatically starting application execution with no manual intervention or with only manual confirmation based upon pre-established criteria
• animating data and enhancing presentation to more effectively relay information.

With P-Tech’s solution to situational awareness, we protect customers’ previous investments, while adding independent assessments and functionality. P-Tech’s approach is a methodical one that reduces the risk of human errors and recognizes safety as the primary concern.