Sankara NarayananInternet of Things is a growing market worldwide. While the Gartner approximates that around 25 billion connected things worldwide by 2020, a recent report on “Internet of Things: A Revolution in the Making” estimates India to have nearly 2.7 billion connected devices by then. And that’s nearly 10% of the world’s IoT market expected to grow to $15 billion by 2020.
“IoT is all around us with more and more devices being connected to provide comfort, convenience and a great experience to the end user. These positive numbers give a clear picture of the future of IoT in energy efficiency being promising…” says Vishal Bansal, COO and co-founder of Zenatix.
Co-founders of Zenatix
The numbers were clear and the co-founders of Zenatix, Rahul, Vishal and Dr. Amarjeet Singh believed in the power of technology & data and wanted to leverage these to make a meaningful contribution towards a sustainable planet.
They all agreed that energy is an underexplored area and IoT and data analytics can contribute significantly. Launched in December 2013, Zenatix was aimed at disrupting the traditional energy efficiency market by focusing on operational energy efficiency and using technology and advanced data analytics to achieve that.
It was an apt opportunity to scale up and make a large scale contribution to the society.
Zenatix currently provides energy efficiency solutions – WattMan, an IoT based Building Management System (BMS) tailor-made for retail chains and banking set-ups (essentially, anyone who has large number of geographically distributed infrastructure) and help them in reducing their electricity consumption by up to 30%.
Given the distributed nature of retail/ banking set-ups (100s of thousands of outlets/branches, spread across the country), having a control over the electricity spend and providing the right customer experience at the same time is a big challenge.
WattMan addresses these challenges in an automated manner through its cloud based intelligent controls driven by advanced machine learning algorithms. It employs proprietary firmware for performing automatic sensing and control.
Wattman
Collected data is used to develop machine learning driven models deciding optimal operational settings based on external factors like weather and footfall, thus allowing sophisticated control and saving up to 30% energy.
The team is continuously developing and adding use cases to the products so as to deliver more value to customers, while simultaneously innovating technologies to reduce costs of hardware and improve its robustness.
“We aim to develop more products to address the energy efficiency problem across a range of customers and eventually help electric grids turn smarter” adds Vishal.
IoT is still a nascent industry in India, and consumers adopting to its applications is still a challenge for many in the field. new technology which is changing the way customers consume energy. “While customers clearly see the benefits of our product, there is an adoption curve for any new technology or product. Having the trust of clients like Mother Dairy, Vodafone, SBI, Fabindia is a step closer to our vision” continues Vishal.
Wattman is currently deployed across the country at 750 locations and they are looking at expanding to other customer segments such as large office buildings, large hotels, hospitals, industrial units etc. The company aims to take the count to 5000 locations by August 2018.