Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster today launched an innovative meter data management product that has the potential to sell globally.

Smart meters allow consumers to monitor and manage their consumption bills and provide more valuable information to the energy supplier about usage patterns.

The Affinity Meterflow® product has been developed in Belfast with support from Invest Northern Ireland by AMT-SYBEX, a UK market leader in data intensive applications for the energy and utility industries.

Invest NI offered over £155,000 of support towards the research and development costs of the product part funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

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Launching Affinity Meterflow for the international market, the Minister said: "This product has been developed in response to European legislation which requires 80% of homes to have a smart meter installed by 2020. This technology will facilitate the transfer of enormous volumes of data generated by smart metering and smart grid related processes.

"As such it has global market potential, and in the UK alone the market opportunity is estimated to be in excess of £35million over the next five years.

"This is a good example of a local company investing in research and development to open up global market opportunities. The project has also led to the development of new skills in leading-edge software technology within the Belfast operation."

Working with IBM, Meterflow has been benchmarked at unprecedented levels of performance and AMT-SYBEX is already in discussions with energy companies and meter manufacturers around the world.

(CD/GK)