Andres is currently the Chief Information Officer at Austin Energy, where he is responsible for the technology vision, planning, development and operations across the enterprise. Since February of 2003, Andres has been driving a wireless and SOA transformation that has resulted in a fully-integrated and self-healing enterprise. In addition to his responsibilities as CIO, Andres is member of the 8 person executive team, and member of the Innovation and Opportunity Development executive board. Outside of Austin Energy, Andres is a board member for the Center for Commercialization of Electric Technologies, a board member for the Large Public Power Companies’ CIO Task Force and chair for the SOA Task Force, and an advisor to several companies.

Andres is a requested visionary speaker on Running IT as a Business, Wireless Broadband delivers the 21st Century, and Delivering a Fully-Integrated and Self-Healing Enterprise. He is co-author of Information Technology Leadership and CTO Best Practices Collection, and a contributor to Player Manager: The Rise of Professionals Who Manage While They Work. And he has been awarded IT Executive of the Year by the Association of Information Technology Professionals in 2005, Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld in 2006, Best in Class of Premier 100 by Computerworld in 2006, and CIO 100 Award by CIO Magazine in 2006.

Andres has great knowledge of the Energy, Software, Computer, and Wireless industries. He has held c-level and senior management titles at Austin Energy, four start-ups, Philips Electronics, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Borland. Andres started his professional career as a product manager for Windows and DOS at Microsoft in Redmond, WA.

Andres received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas, and has completed executive management programs at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania

Austin Energy’s Press Release Company Description
Austin Energy is the 10th largest public power utility in the nation providing low cost reliable power to the capitol city of Texas and metro area, with annual revenues over $1 billion servicing 400,000 premises representing around 41,000 businesses and 1 million consumers. Austin Energy is also recognized as an industry leader in conservation and renewable energy offering the most comprehensive residential and commercial energy efficiency programs in the nation; active in the use and management of distributed generation by operating the first fuel cell in Texas tied directly to the electric grid and the largest module combined heat and power plant in the nation, and using the best solutions for information technology and telecommunications to deliver the nation’s first fully-integrated and self-healing utility.

Presentation
Building an SOA to Power the Smart Grid
Andres will review the SOA transformation that he has been leading at Austin Energy over the past four years. The steps to build the nation's first smart grid have been driven by the need to simplify infrastructure, improve decision making, adapt to faster changing business needs, improve disaster recovery and business continuity planning, improve regulatory compliance, increase quality standards, increase reliability, increase customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs.

Austin Energy's Smart Grid is powered by a Service Oriented Architecture that follows the principle of delivering presentation, process, and information as services to all stakeholders. From controlling central power plants, distributed energy plants, the wholesale energy system, the transmission and distribution grid, the meters, smart appliances at customer sites, and the delivery of timely information via portals to all customer types.

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