Company Profile · Energy & Utilities Software
Sun-Net Inc.
The quiet software that keeps the grid's busiest desk from drowning in paper.
The quiet software that keeps the grid's busiest desk from drowning in paper.
Somewhere in North America, a transmission line drops offline. Within seconds, an operator is logging the event, pulling up the switching order, checking who tagged what, and starting the paperwork that regulators will eventually want to read. None of this is glamorous. All of it has to be right. For more than 80 utility companies, the screen the operator is staring at belongs to a small San Jose firm called Sun-Net Inc.
Sun-Net does not make turbines or string power lines. It makes the system of record for the people who run the grid - the software that turns a frantic 3 a.m. into an orderly sequence of logged, tagged, compliant steps. Since 1999, that has been the entire job. Not flashy. Just load-bearing.
By the numbers: small company, outsized presence in the rooms that matter.
iTOA (integrated Tools for Operations Application) is Sun-Net's web-based, HTML5 platform for utility control centers. It replaces a stack of binders, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge with one consolidated application. Its tagline is refreshingly free of poetry: "Achieve Safety, Reliability and Efficiency."
A task-driven workflow for submitting, reviewing, and approving outage requests - so a planned outage stays planned.
Configurable switching-order and tagging rules that keep field crews safe and the lights honest.
A template-based electronic logbook for operator entries and shift turnover. The clipboard, retired with dignity.
Captures interruption events manually or straight from SCADA and historian systems. Fewer typos, more truth.
Root-cause analysis with corrective actions and built-in tracking for NERC TADS and PRC-004 misoperation reporting.
Custom queries, ad-hoc exports, and calendar / Gantt / timeline views across millions of records.
Six modules, one login. The unglamorous architecture of keeping a city lit.
Utilities operate under a thick rulebook. NERC standards like PRC-004 demand that misoperations get analyzed and reported; TADS asks for transmission outage data; auditors ask for proof. Get it wrong and the penalty is measured in fines - or worse, in darkness. iTOA's pitch is that the audit trail builds itself while operators simply do their jobs. The reporting is a byproduct of the logging, not a second shift of data entry.
That is why a 87-person company in San Jose ends up inside Fortune 500 control rooms. The software is small. The stakes are enormous.
Illustrative emphasis across the iTOA suite, not a vendor benchmark.
More than 100 control centers across 80+ utilities run the suite - from Fortune 500 giants to municipal cooperatives. A sampling of the names on the badge:
Customer names compiled from Sun-Net's public materials and press. Logos belong to their respective owners.
Sun-Net's team is an unusual hybrid: power systems engineers, computer scientists, and former control-center operators in the same room. That mix is the whole point - the people building the software have stood the 3 a.m. shift it serves. The company is privately held, WBENC and NMSDC certified, and keeps a lean footprint of around 87 people across North America and Asia.
The line that tripped is already logged. The switching order is on screen, the tags accounted for, the event timestamped and queued for the analysis a regulator will read next quarter. The operator hasn't opened a single binder. By sunrise, the report is most of the way written - not because anyone stayed late, but because the system wrote it down as the night happened.
That is the trade Sun-Net offers the people who keep the lights on: less paper, fewer errors, and an audit trail that builds itself. Twenty-five years in, the company is still doing the one thing it set out to do in 1999 - making the grid's busiest desk a little less chaotic, one logged event at a time.
Sources: sunnetsoftware.com · LinkedIn · Crunchbase · LeadIQ · RocketReach. Figures such as employee count and revenue are third-party estimates and approximate.