OATI
Mary Brown is Chief Legal Officer at OATI. Ali Ipakchi is Executive Vice President at OATI.
This year, DistribuTECH International had a theme of "Experience the Energy Movement," with thirteen educational tracks and a massive exposition floor holding over five hundred booths. The PUF team met up with innovators making a difference with emerging technologies useful to the grid space.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Talk about OATI and its origins in the '90s.
Mary Brown: The origins of OATI stem at the confluence of what FERC was doing in the mid-'90s with deregulation, FERC Orders 888 and 889, as well as what was happening from a platform perspective and business model delivery.
In the mid-'90s, there was something called the internet. No business used it as a viable business platform in the mid-'90s.
The founder of our organization, Sasan Mokhtari, looked and said, "The way that business is operated and done in the energy industry is going to change, and it's going to change dramatically in the next five years." As a result, he formed OATI in 1995.
Less than one year later, OATI became the first vendor organization in North America to offer web-based services. It was the first time that the highest-level technical solutions were available to any organization that wanted access to those solutions.