Utilisoft announces GateKeeper 4 - revised platform and architecture

Tuesday Feb 3^rd 2009. Utilisoft Pty Ltd, the leading provider of energy market connectivity solutions, today announced the release of a completely revised and updated version of its industry leading gateway solution for Australian energy market participants. GateKeeper 4 inherits and improves upon Utilisoft’s existing GateKeeper 2 product functionality and capabilities which has been in use at many of Australia’s leading energy utilities for the last decade.

GateKeeper 4 is built on the J2EE platform and makes extensive use of open source Java technologies such as Struts, Spring and Hibernate. GateKeeper 4 also includes a new web based user interface for ease of configuration and use that includes management and maintenance of energy market connectivity and market messages. A key new benefit of GateKeeper 4 is the Interceptor API – a very simple and effective customisation feature that allows electricity and gas clients to implement their own unique complex routing logic or preferred delivery protocol without interfering with the base operation of the gateway. Out-of-the-box, GateKeeper 4 provides performance improvements, new and advanced functionality, customisable industry workflows and platform level redundancy. This not only addresses current gateway challenges but caters for the challenges that Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) will impose.

Utilisoft’s Technical Director, Nick Nikolitsis said “Our existing GateKeeper product has served our energy clients well and has kept pace with the evolving energy markets and iterations of industry XML. With the increase in volume and complexity introduced by AMI it became clear that we needed to release a highly scalable, customisable and manageable offering to address our client’s future needs whilst addressing current challenges. We re-architected and re-modelled GateKeeper to provide an energy market gateway which is not only reliable, enterprise scalable and easy to customise, but is also low maintenance”. Nick added “the introduction of an operationally focused UI with a common look & feel is a major step forward over the complex Admin UI of GateKeeper 2”.

Lucy Aston, Red Energy CIO, commented “As an existing user of GateKeeper Version 2 for our NEM and VIC Gas customers we were very keen to trial the new GateKeeper Version 4. Our technical team were impressed by the architecture of the product (the solution uses Spring/Hibernate and other modern Java technologies) and with the elegance and simplicity of the new Interceptor classes which will allow us to implement our own custom routing requirements, in Java, without interfering with the base configuration of the gateway”. 

About Utilisoft

Utilisoft Pty Ltd is an established supplier of software solutions to the Energy & Utilities industry with years of experience in managing mission-critical dataflow requirements for energy market participants. More Australian energy market participants rely on Utilisoft solutions for market connectivity than any other single offering. Utilisoft’s clients include Aurora Energy, Country Energy, Jackgreen Energy, Powerdirect, Red Energy and TRUenergy.

For further information on Utilisoft’s energy market connectivity and smart meter solutions, please contact:

Allen Taylor

Utilisoft Pty Ltd

Mobile: +61 (0)434 424 050

Email: info@utilisoft.com.au