"They're traditional IT services that only recently in the energy utilities industry was the domain of network guys" such as Siemens and GE, Murray says. "The opportunity is now. There's a tipping point any day now.
"Companies like Energy Australia, SP AusNet, Integral, Powercor [are] starting to align to this transformation. If you're not talking to these companies now then your competition is."
Murray says providers of database and customer relationships systems are in particularly powerful positions to help utilities make sense of smart grid data.
"I don't think it's the domain for the IBMs [big IT integrators] solely - those who can get into the industry and show some insight in other industries [such as retail] will be successful." And he picks data storage resellers as likely winners.
With all that information being collected and flowing around the networks, security and privacy will take on new meaning. The potential for abuse worries CSC senior security consultant Gabriel d'Eustachio - but not so much that he would call a halt to the rollouts.
"The amount of data you can deduce from someone's use patterns (from a meter) is really quite frightening," d'Eustachio says. "All of a sudden I know a lot about what you're doing during the day and when you're out of the house.
"I wonder if I could look at your power and your use pattern and deduce if there's an appliance that isn't working as well as it could so I'll market aggressively to you. As a private matter it's no one else's business.
"We have to make sure we have regulatory bodies surrounding it so that people's privacy is respected."
He says the "public should weigh in on" laws and controls so that data on energy and water use isn't used against individuals.
D'Eustachio sees opportunities for providers of security and privacy technologies and services to provide the ethical and legal foundations on which those with networking and marketing smarts, respectively, would collaborate.
CSC is working with technology companies as an honest broker to test the security claims of their products, he says.
Although much of the early work is aimed at managing distributors' grids, the inclusion of a low-bandwidth, wireless networking technology for the home called Zigbee should see smart appliances appear in homes and offices in a few years.
At present, data is collected from dumb meters only once every few months when a reader visits the house. Second-generation smart meters report back every half hour, but the data may only be delivered daily and then only to the power companies.
The promise held out by smart meters is real-time delivery of data to consumers to help them modify their energy use behaviours, although energy insiders say this is a pipe dream in the next five to 10 years. If this day comes, Zigbee will be a key technology.
A house with a Zigbee wireless hub could be programmed to turn on the clothes dryer or dishwasher or defrost the fridge only at night when energy was cheap.
And when electric cars such as the descendents of the Prius become as common as Commodores on our streets, stored power trickled into their batteries at night could be fed back into the grid to power the home or sold back to the power companies.
Imagine a dashboard on your wall or mobile phone telling you your energy use in real-time, along with tips to save money.
Such possibilities excite industry mavens who see an explosion of consumers becoming producers of energy through the installation of solar cells on their roofs, for instance, selling power into the grid to delay infrastructure spending.
Networking makers are looking to build such smarts into consumer routers and switches. And such ideas are trickling from US development labs at Google and Microsoft but the Australian infrastructure is yet to be primed to talk to such devices.
Such "critical" technology is being "actively debated" in national forums, says Perry.
"Government doesn't like prescribing technologies but, in this case, because we wanted to have the same consumer experience across all of Victoria, Government was driven to a point where we needed one standard, open interface," Perry says.
"This whole area of the 'HAN' (home-area network) is huge and its benefits to society will be enormous - it will enable people to [easily] reduce peak demand on hot days. GE and Whirlpool in the US are working on fridges with Zigbee interfaces to defer the defrost cycle.
"The appliance makers will build in [intelligence] that says: 'You want to run the dishwasher, OK, but it's peak time so it will cost you'. The same thing applies to air-conditioning: on peak periods it would by cycled - 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off. You wouldn't notice any appreciable change in comfort levels ... [or] you can say I want to override that [and pay the premium]."
Perry says the intent isn't for the power company to be a "Big Brother" but to give consumers control over their power use and spending and to reflect the real cost of generation while reducing carbon emissions.
And it's a "huge opportunity" for resellers, he says. "Electronics vendors ought to be getting busy, their products ready and their overall market positioning because HANs enable all range of stuff. There's so much that can be done in this space ... to optimise cost and comfort levels."
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