Nearly Thirty Years of EDI Over the Internet in the Energy Industry

Sit back and enjoy a little journey through Internet history, EDI over the Internet and the birth of TECH-COMM Inc.

In December 1993, Joanne and I started our first Company, TECH-COMM Inc, a software company building products to enable commercial Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) transactions on the Internet, located in Birmingham, Alabama. The Internet had just opened for “Commercial Traffic” and people were talking about how B2B and B2C were going to change the world. It’s clear to see now that this was a prophecy that we now live through in our everyday reality in 2024.

I first started working on the IETF in 1992 with the EDIINT workgroup, which led to the creation of the EDI over the Internet RFC 1767, “MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects“ The business value was obvious, replace your “Value Added Network” (VAN) provider with the Internet and save money on EDI message exchange costs and get all the other benefits the Internet offered like E-Mail and “The World Wide Web”. The concept took off and was highly successful, and still used today to exchange transaction within the energy industry, starting with the Natural Gas industry, in 1995 and expanding to the Electric industry around 1999. 

Today, Billions of dollars in energy transactions travel the Internet each day using Energy industry B2B standards defined by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB), formerly known as GISB. TECH-COMM was at the forefront of this EDI over the Internet movement and I was deeply involved in developing the GISB/NAESB standards, called “Electronic Delivery Mechanism” (EDM), following the IETF RFC 1767 standard, using MIME to package EDI content, which was delivered via “The Web” using the HTTPS protocol between transacting business entities, no VAN needed. .NAESB’s EDM standard is a FERC Regulation and has been widely adopted across State PUC’s to exchange Energy “business transactions” securely and reliably within the electric industry. TECH-COMM’s EDI over the Internet B2B product, known as Inside Agent continues to deliver energy industry EDI transactions over the Internet, reliably and securely to this day. (TECH-COMM was acquired by some Venture Capitalists and I learned all about minority shareholder squeeze-out tactics in 2001, which is why Business Cyber Guardian will never allow VC’s to become part of the company). 

Today, we know just how risky it can be living on the Internet with hackers inflicting harm through ransomware attacks and other nefarious acts. My focus has shifted from enabling parties to use the Internet for B2B activities to preventing hackers from inflicting harm on the parties that use the Internet as a critical part of their missions. This is a much bigger challenge due to the presence of a very skillful and innovative adversary that is using crypto currencies to extract “real wealth” from others that are just trying to “do business”. The energy industry in particular is a “juicy” target for hackers as the industry adopts more “digital technologies” as part of the energy transition, and the vital role that energy serves within our critical infrastructure. Implementing “Secure by Design” principles and practices in our software/digital ecosystems is key to stopping the hackers from succeeding. A pilot project proposal has been submitted to EPRI to help secure the energy industry from risky software products using NIST standards and CISA’s “Secure by Design” practices described in CISA’s Secure by Design Software Acquisition Guide practices.