WASHINGTON, Oct. 27, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- The Washington director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency kicked off the annual advanCES conference this morning with a keynote address on distribution system security and emergency response.
FEMA Director Peter LaPorte delivered his address at the headquarters of electrical utility Pepco, the host of this year's conference. Now in its fifth year, advanCES has become a premier event for distribution utility executives and engineers, attracting participants from the world's leading utilities. CES International produces advanCES in conjunction with its Centricity customer advisory group.
Conference speakers include Jon Arnold, editor-in-chief of Platts' Energy Business & Technology magazine; Ken Cohn, PHI vice president and group chief information officer; Joe Bucciero of KEMA Consulting; and John Blend, president and CEO of CES International.
The advanCES conference features case studies and presentations from a number of CES International utility customers and partners, as well as a hurricane Isabel panel in which six utilities will share strategies, best practices and lessons they learned from the storm.
Conference sponsors include ESRI, ExtenSys, Global Enterprise Managers, HP, JCMB, KEMA Consulting, Krohm and MDSI. Platt's Energy Business & Technology Magazine is the sponsoring publication.
Blend welcomed advanCES 2003 delegates at the opening general session commenting, "As advanCES delegates, you hail from five different continents, but each of you share the common goal of improving distribution system performance, customer service, security and emergency response."
Additional details on advanCES 2003 are available at www.advanCES2003.com.
About CES International
CES International supplies real-time software solutions to utilities on five continents, serving more than 35 million metered accounts. CES International is the developer of the Centricity operations resource management (ORM) system, which includes the market's leading outage-management system, and the newly developed Energy Delivery Management (EDM) suite of network-management software. For more information, visit www.ces.com or call 1-800-450-0266. CES International - Redefining Connectivity.
Trademarks: CES International, Centricity and the CES International "network sweep logo" design are registered trademarks on file with the US Patent and Trademark Office and the European Union. InterSys, CES.com, and advanCES are trademarks of CES International. Other trademarks are used for reference only.