Itron announced on Thursday that is has just released an improved version of its OpenWay Collection Engine, with better security features. The current version of OpenWay does comply with the security guidelines issued by American National Standards Institute. However, the new version exceeds these security requirements to provide security that meets the standards of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) "Critical Cyber Asset" requirements as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) standards.

In a company press release, Kip Gering, Itron’s senior product line manager for OpenWay, commented on the new release:

"The OpenWay architecture exceeds security requirements using proven industry algorithms to meet the networking demands for smart metering and the Smart Grid," said Kip Gering, senior product line manager for OpenWay. "Enhanced by our partnership with Certicom, our solution is capable of handling secure message traffic and key management for 10 million meters, while the OpenWay CENTRON(R) meter provides the computing power to process secured network messages in just milliseconds."