(Source: Business Wire)Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ:ELON) announced today that it is the recipient of the Information Technology Council of North Dakota (ITCND) Premier IT Business award. The award recognizes individuals, entities and businesses that play a vital role in developing the North Dakota IT industry. Echelon was selected for its Networked Energy Services (NES) System Software, which is developed in Echelon's Fargo, North Dakota software development center.

Echelon's NES System is a software-driven smart grid solution used by utilities for smart metering, grid management, and customer care purposes. The NES System is an integral part of the smart grid's infrastructure and is comprised of three major components -- NES Smart Meters, NES Data Concentrators, and NES System Software -- that utilize the grid itself as the communications network.

In utilizing the grid itself, the NES System creates grid intelligence that enables the utility to manage and deploy a single network that provides data about power quality such as voltage, total harmonic distortion, and current analysis that can help the utility operate the grid more reliably and efficiently without the risk and cost associated with dedicated RF meshing networks. The system provides extremely reliable "core" functionality dedicated to advanced metering services including time of use metering, outage detection, theft and tamper detection, very accurate data collection, high reliability, and extensibility from a few thousand to millions of customers.

"Since January 2007, the engineering organization within our Fargo office has grown by over 50 percent to support the rapidly growing smart grid market," said Steve Green, director of engineering, NES System Software, Echelon Fargo. "The NES System Software transforms the metering business of a utility into an intelligent, enterprise data system. Our NES System Software is integrated into a utility's enterprise IT infrastructure through open web interfaces -- typically along with custom applications -- and provides the software infrastructure that manages the smart grid.