Meter maker and smart grid technology firm Elster Solutions plans to lay off 98 people in Raleigh as it shuts down its decades-old manufacturing operations here and relocates that function to Mexico.

Elster has been one of three national utility meter makers in the Triangle and has had a local presence going back to 1955, when the company started out as Westinghouse. Elster's rival smart grid developers with Triangle operations are Sensus and Itron.

Raleigh is home to more than 530 Elster workers and will remain the company's North American headquarters, said Joe Orlando, Elster's vice-president for strategy and marketing.

Elster is moving manufacturing to Mexico because it has a greater demand from Latin America, Orlando said. The company is keeping other operations here, such as engineering, development, marketing, customer support and product management, Orlando said.

Two global technology companies with a large Triangle presence have announced a business partnership to develop a smart grid suite of products.

Cisco System, the Silicon Valley computer networking giant, will work with German utility meter designer Elster to create a system that runs Elster's advanced meters over Cisco's infrastructure. Cisco got its start in routers and switches and has expanded worldwide by selling technology that moves and routes voice and data over the Internet.

The deal, announced Tuesday, underscores the increasing dependence of smart meters on complex computer networks. Smart meters operate more like computer terminals linked to a giant wireless network rather than individual meters connected to nothing but a home.

Elster Group, a global maker of utility meters with major facilities in Raleigh, began trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange this morning despite failing to reach its target price per share.

Elster is just the latest company locally and nationally whose initial public offering of stock failed to meet original projections. The spate of lower stock prices suggest that investors continue to have doubts about business growth prospects in an anemic economy.

Bloomberg News reported that at least 45 companies have shelved or withdrawn their IPOs in this country amid concerns about the state of the economy.

A company doing businesses more than five decades in the Triangle could start trading publicly as early as tomorrow in an effort to tap into the "Smart Grid" technology trend and raise more than $250 million on Wall Street.

Elster Group filed for an initial public offering on Sept. 13 and has been negotiating the value of its stock with prospective institutional buyers. Once the financial institutions commit to a price, the shares will begin trading publicly.

Elster is floating 16.2 million American Depository Shares that it hopes will be valued between $16 and $18 per share.

Two Triangle-based companies well known in the power industry are teaming up to gain an edge in the fast-emerging market for Smart Grid technology.
Raleigh-based Sensus and Cary-based ABB announced their business partnership this morning in Tampa, Fla., at the annual DistribuTech conference for the electricity transmission and distribution industry.
The partnership will combine ABB's strength in power transmission and distribution systems with Sensus' expertise with advanced utility meters. The two companies plan to develop technologies and applications to help power companies improve fault detection, outage location, power restoration, among other benefits.