Will Utilities Market Energy Management? Tendril Launches The Vision

We spoke with Scott Ballantyne, VP of Marketing for Tendril about the launch of their new energy management product, the “Vision”. Scott has more than 22 years experience leading international high-technology branding, marketing and business teams with some of the world’s largest and most successful corporations. As Vice President Marketing for Tendril, he is responsible for Tendril’s overall brand development and the marketing of the company’s energy management platform to key utility customers and partners. Scott also oversees the company’s product management and segmentation work. He has executive experience developing and implementing global marketing programs with Hewlett Packard, InFocus, T-Mobile, Asia Global Crossing, Dell and Motorola. Scott holds a degree in Physics from the School of Technology at The University of Paisley and an MBA from The University of Glasgow. He serves on the National Advisory Board of the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

Full Transcription:

Scott Ballantyne: Tendril is a software “established platform company based in Boulder, CO. We’ve been around for four and a half years. We’re venture capital backed, last year raising $55 million. And our essence is basically to enable an ongoing real-time dialogue between energy providers, i.e. utilities, and the consumers that allows consumers to be aware of primarily how they’re consuming and therefore spending therefore spending their energy.  And at the same time, allowing utilities to understand consumer behavior such that working together, ultimately the goal is that utilities don’t have to spend too much money generating so much electricity because consumers are more aware of how they’re using and therefore changing their behavior and using less energy, therefore saving money and obviously the environment. So we are an enabling technology for a software platform, a host of products and and services that allow that unique dialogue between the provider and user in today’s energy market.

We were delighted last week at the Distributech in front of about 6,000 people and a very keen interest with what drives the customers to deliver on the promise of at last a device that not necessarily only through hardware, but through deep research, consumer interaction, and consumer behavior understanding a product that has a visual interface that allows the consumer to, in a non-obtrusive manner in an everyday environment, to at a glance, to look at a, basically, a piece of furniture in the design of a clock and understand by the colors of the hour hand how much their energy is costing at that time. So what we did was with the design company, Ideal, based at Palo Alto, is we spent about nine months, researching primarily the consumers interaction with energy. I found that people are obviously very into spending less money, but they were not necessarily desiring a full screen and home to have that dialogue with the utility. So this device, again, as an everyday clock, just is at the 9-10 feet view, allows you to see at a glance what’s happening. But as you get closer, a deep interaction with how you’re spending versus last week. How you’re going to spend to the rest of your bill for the month. How you’re spending versus similar neighbors who opted into the same program. What that means to your carbon footprint. What that means, therefore, ultimately, to what you’re using, when you’re using, how much you’re using that will affect the consumer’s ability to change behavior and their cost savings.

Along with our other products like our Volt which is, if you like a smart plug, using the Zigbee standards, we can actually show a consumers the usage per appliance and therefore with a deep insight to tips and tricks and obviously because this is a cloud-based software offering, we collect all of that data, and therefore can compare how your fridge is performing today versus where it was last week. They also, you can imagine, therefore, go on a go-forward basis to start to even predict where certain appliances need preventative maintenance or when even needs upgrading. We can show real deep insight into the whole what in the home is using energy, how the home is performing versus, again, same time last week, same time last year with built-in weather patterns. But then we’ll say to the consumer, if you want to save certain amount of dollars and cents, you may want to change our thermostat to  seventy degrees versus seventy-two because this is our best in case to the rest of the data that we’ve collected. And then, therefore, we can help you save that energy.

Q: What relationship do you have with utilities?

Scott Ballantyne: The research we did was not just on the consumer space. Ultimately, today, our right to market and our customer is actually developing. And what the utilities are find over, not only years but decades, is that unless you have the right tool to make energy very aware to consumers such that it’s engaging enough that the consumer will, in fact, change their behavior then this dialogue does not happen. And all that happens is people are persuaded that they don’t know the data and therefore can’t act upon it. So our work is actually primarily today what utilities that they will be our primary customer of this device and this exchange. And then they will help install the meters and then allow that consumer to save a complete end-to-end and then very importantly real-time information. And when that light is all the way back to the utility, that’s where certain states and utilities are providing this information, we can show that consumer time-of-use pricing, real-time on and off peak pricing. But again back to my earlier statement, uniquely the best two-way, very proactive and very satisfying dialogue between the provider and the energy consumer.

There’s multiple technology radios built in there so we have a broadband connection. We have a Zigbee connection such that as long as there was a way even through an ERT to read the meter signal, we can do that through an EMI deployment. We can do that through an EMR deployment, and even through standard-based meters uniquely today. The immediate business case is obviously the product you showed us from the utility, to be inspired, to have that dialogue with the consumer, and therefore they will deploy. But obviously as you can imagine a roadmap going forward is  solution that can also allow the consumer to be involved with us on a direct-the-consumer basis that they may not get all of the data directly from the utility, for instance, time of use. But what they can still see through the involvement from our software platform and  our NOC, on a cloud-basis is information about their usage generally, their usage over time, their usage compared to other people. They’ll also bought into the system.  So therefore where we are today is just an announcement. Where we’re going is to build a suite of products that also includes a disaggregated hardware solution that we’re working with utilities that they can deploy branded portal environments that basically show the same and even going forward even more information.

So we’re trying to surround the consumer in a manner in which is most receptive to them. Some people want it in their iPhone which we already have an iPhone out. Some people will wish for dedicated hardware, and some people will just probably go to a web portal. And we support those all and going forward, we will have direct-to-consumer hardware specifically.

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