At last year’s GITA conference, GE Energy announced plans to develop a suite of products on the Oracle Spatial platform. This past January, they released the first application on Oracle for electric distribution and at the conference announced another for gas distribution. The company believes that while many larger utilities may not be quite ready to migrate from an existing SmallWorld configuration, these recent product announcements on Oracle are a first step toward offering a suite of business applications.

GE maintains that it will continue to support SmallWorld and MAGIC indefinitely. They believe that customers will still use it for a customized GIS solution. GE also offers and “office suite” of applications on SmallWorld technology and will build its suite of applications on Oracle in parallel.

GE recently purchased Fichtner IT Consulting, a German engineering company that has a software solution built on Oracle. GE believes that Fichtner will support “mining” of data assets as customers move into the Oracle environment