By reading Landis & Gyr FutureReady newspaper, I come to the idea that they have found a strategy for entering smart grim market.
From this newspaper "in the US 3000 municipal and electric cooperatives deliver power to almost one-third of the nation's total population".
It means that these "small" power distribution companies can have a huge benefit from using cloud based smart grid services (as also suggested by Landis & Gyr). Instead of having an army of different types of professionals which are needed when power distribution company has its own solution (which is maybe ok for bigger players), small utility usually is not able to support in-house solution(usually expensive). So, cloud based solution would be very good strategy for attracting this kind of clients - they can choose limited functionality to test and try what this software can give them, to expand their choice easily (by having in-house solution, obtaining and installing new functionality would increase costs significantly, because it again requires different types of actions to be done. In cloud they would just subscribe to another function and start using it, in the beginning maybe as a trial version, and if they found is useful, they can use it permanently.
And if they are not satisfied they can abandon the solution without too much costs.
This cloud based solution would be also beneficial for the solution providers (from the technical aspect), and it would reduce the costs and in that way more utilities would install and use the smart grid solutions.
