Industry Expertise - Talk about Know-How from Overseas!

From electrical engineering to network modeling, software development to customer deliveries, this man rightfully plays a key role when developing our software for North American utilities. Originally from Europe, he has also faced the structural and technical ​differences between the American and European style electrical networks – and truly knows what he’s talking about!

The man is Vasile Dragu, manager of engineering at Trimble Energy North America. He not only combines his academic education in the electrical engineering with 20+ years of experience in the software industry, but also makes it spot-on about the people operating the power systems and the issues they face in reality.

​“You must understand the electricity, the electric networks themselves and also how people operate the networks, what their concerns are, and what kinds of safety issues there are,” Vasile reflects, continuing: “It is very important, because when talking to people in an electrical company, the issues instantly make sense to me on all the different levels.”

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Reflections: European vs. American Networks

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Today, Vasile runs the engineering group based in Huntsville, Alabama, a team that combines people with various skills, responsibility areas and backgrounds for product development. “Working together is business as usual for our entire division, so that everybody always helps each other out, whether it be developing, testing, deploying, bug fixing or offering support services for the customers,” Vasile explains. It’s the mixture of skills that helps provide the best possible service to our customers.
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Vasile’s team also works in a very close collaboration with the development team in Espoo, Finland. “We have a lot of common development. Either suggestions from our side are developed by the Espoo group or we develop our own extensions and use them in the U.S. in conjunction with the core solutions”, Vasile explains.

“Some of our U.S. customers have been with us for about ​20 years.”

​I have really enjoyed working with so many different people.” Vasile puts a lot of value on meeting everyone face-to-face, even if it’s overseas: “We've had some people visiting Espoo, and some people from Espoo travelling to the US office and had some personal interaction. You need to meet everybody. Even if you normally talk on the phone or email, still, you just need to go and sit down and discuss. I think it makes the world of difference”.

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IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Vasile Dragu has done just about everything related to electric utilities - transferring from electrical engineering to the software modeling for electrical industry, starting from GIS, then outage management, DMS, and the list goes on.
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​Originally from Romania, Vasile first completed his Master’s Degree in power systems, continuing to work as an assistant professor at the Technical University of Timisoara. Since then, he moved to the United States and became the main driver for developing our first platform in the late 1990s, and has continued at the heart of the development ever since.

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Vasile also finds it very important to have everybody with at least some level of understanding on the electrical industry. “It's hard to describe everything that the software should do in very small detail, and sometimes people have to use their own judgement for whether something will work or not. The more people can make their own decisions, especially the developers, the better the software will be and the faster the development goes on.”

I’ve always wondered how he manages all that he does, but sitting down and talking to him in person, I now know: The man not only knows, he also cares. And that, indeed, is a combination to move mountains.

-Hanna

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