Final Post

Somebody once told me that the only thing that stays the same in this life is change itself. So true.

On August 15, 2011 Advanced Telemetry was sold to Siemens Building Technologies (SBT). I am staying on as Director of Cloud Computing for SBT and will continue to contribute to the development of the EcoView product as well as explore new applications for cloud services within the organization. Details of the acquisition can be found here.

This blog will be shut down sometime in the next few weeks or months. I have, however, started a new one: The Cloud Line. The new blog will be centered around general cloud computing topics and technologies and will not focus on the EcoView product at all.

Thanks to all of you that have followed this blog and taken an interest in Advanced Telemetry and the EcoView product line. It was a fun ride and the product will now take advantage of a much more capable marketing and distribution infrastructure. Siemens Building Technologies is a very forward-thinking company with great plans for the EcoView product. It will be exciting to watch.

-Tom

We've Been Blogged!

Like many, I find the evolution of social networking to be an endlessly fascinating aspect of modern society. In particular, I think it is interesting how social networking intersects with business and influences the growth of technology-based industries. I am not sure that everyone would agree with a taxonomy where the blog is a first-class member of the social networking landscape (my kids for instance couldn't point to a blog if their lives depended upon it, but they do know all about Facebook, Twitter, etc.) but for me the blog is still an important player in the overall structure and trajectory of the social networking evolution.

Last week I got to experience a new aspect of social networking experience - being blogged about. Now, I cannot be certain that Advanced Telemetry (or me personally) hasn't been blogged about previously, but this is certainly the first time that I have been aware of it. The blogger in this case is Microsoft technical architect David Chou. David has been a huge help to me over the past couple of years as I have migrated the Advanced Telemetry product architecture to the Windows Azure platform. David is just one of those guys that seems tirelessly motivated and always ready to offer assistance and advice when it comes to cloud computing topics. For my money he is definitely emerging as one of the thought-leaders in cloud computing and has authored many highly insightful technical papers and articles.

David was largely responsible for introducing the Advanced Telemetry story to Microsoft and has been an advocate and supporter from the first time he came to visit us here in San Diego. His recent blog posting is really an overview of a couple of case studies and other press coverage that we have received from Microsoft over the past 6 months or so. He did a great job of putting it together and it is definitely worth a read. You can find it at the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2011/03/14/cloud-optimized-architecture-and-advanced-telemetry.aspx

Chipping away at my 15 mins of fame...

Last year I had the great fortune to be invited to participate in a Microsoft SDR (Software Design Review) event  in Redmond, WA. The focus of the review was the Microsoft cloud computing platform known as Windows Azure. As mentioned in previous posts, we are an early adopter of the Azure platform and moved all of our middleware and web applications into Azure early last year.

As a strong proponent of cloud computing in general, as well as the convergence of cloud computing and intelligent device networks in particular, I was absolutely thrilled and honored to participate in the Azure SDR process. This is an invitation-only club and only about 50 people from all over the world get to attend. Due to my NDA with Microsoft I cannot name names, but suffice it to say that there some real heavyweights from some of the biggest companies in the world in this little crowd - not to mention some of the more famous Microsoft personalities known to geeks like me worldwide. The 2 SDR events that I have attended so far have proven to be some of the most rewarding professional development experiences that I have yet encountered.

Late in January of this year I attended my second Azure SDR event and at one point during the 4 day session I was interviewed by the Microsoft technical media team known as Channel 9. This was a great experience as well and yesterday they published the interview along with a case study about Advanced Telemetry. Now, let me say that I was coming down with a head cold and as a result my voice was a little raspy. Whats more, I have done precious few on-camera interviews in my career and, as you will see, the lack of experience clearly shows.

Anyway, I thought it might be of interest to some of the folks that follow my blog but have never met me.

For some reason the video format is a little goofy on the case study link, so for a better version of the video alone you can go right to the Channel 9 outlet here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Inside+Out/Building-on-Azure-Advanced-Telemetry

The whole case study and video (upper right corner) can be accessed here:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000009076

Enjoy.

It's Been A While...

To the small handful of folks out there that bother to follow by blog, I do apologize for the long hiatus but in my own defense I must say that there was at least a partial justification for it. In late fall of last year we entered into discussions with a large building automation equipment manufacturer to license and private label our energy management product, EcoView. At the time we were expecting to have the deal done by mid Q4 and my next blog post was to announce the change. Alas, big company processes and the inevitable delays they impose prevailed and the deal was not done until Feb 1 of this year (2011).

It turns out that getting the deal done does not entitle me to publish the name of our new OEM license partner, however, which means that I cannot reveal the name of this Fortune 100 company as part of this blog post. Anyone who follows the consolidation of the building automation market over the past few years will know that there are only a small handful of large, international players left and, until I am given the green light to publicize the name, I will have to leave you to guess at which one it is.

So what does this mean for Advanced Telemetry and the EcoView product? It means that our highly innovative and market leading product, EcoView Commercial, will now be distributed by one of the biggest corporations on the planet. EcoView, it seems, has graduated into the mainstream market for energy management products and our license partner will be able to open the market in ways that we could only dream of previous to this. Their reach, sterling brand reputation and global footprint will give the EcoView product a new level of exposure and accessibility. I could not be more excited by this opportunity.

Expect to see some public announcements sometime soon as well as updates to our website that will reflect the change in distribution. Our new OEM partner has exclusive, worldwide distribution rights so over the coming months there will be a gradual transition for processes such as submitting orders and requesting support. In the meanwhile, we are still here and able to eliminate any friction in the transition process.

As soon as I am able I will post again with more details about this change.

The Power of the Platform

First of all let me say that for all 3 of you that follow my blog, I am sorry for the gap since my last post. I have been largely occupied as of late with activities surrounding our latest funding round as well as handling a couple of new opportunities that are of a sort that only I can deal with. These fall in the category of "platform sales" or sometimes "private label" opportunities and my experiences with these have inspired this blog post.

One thing about the EcoView EMS product that few people know or appreciate is that it is built on top of a telemetry platform that was originally architected and developed ahead of any real product concepts such as EcoView. My original vision was to develop a platform that could support a wide range of telemetry applications and featured a local touchscreen user interface that doubled as the telemetry gateway device. The server system middleware was designed to support any remote monitoring and control application and as a result has very few intrinsic data types and no expectations in terms of the types of devices that could be controlled and monitored.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into the core platform, internally known as the TAF (Telemetry Application Framework) over the past 7 years and it has evolved along with the needs of applications such as the GE Ecodashboard, the Breezeplay residential energy management product and, most recently, our own branded energy management product known as EcoView. In fact, many more development hours have gone into the TAF than have gone into any of the application variants - including EcoView. This may be surprising to some, seeing as how EcoView is our primary product and the focus of our marketing efforts.Products such as EcoView, however, represent the thinnest possible layer on top of the TAF technology stack. Moving forward, we are looking to extend our market reach by pursuing many other vertical applications that the TAF is ideally suited for. Examples include back-up generators, refrigeration equipment and pumping systems. Unitary equipment such as this would benefit greatly from the ability to remotely collect runtime data, generate alarms and provide real-time remote monitoring and control. The touchscreen UI is also of value since a laptop is ordinarily required to interface with machines of this sort and a permanent, full-color display would add convenience for local operators.As we head towards 2011 the emphasis on new vertical applications for the TAF will gain greater importance as well as focus for the company overal. Expect to see web site adjustments and marketing efforts aimed at exploiting the platform technology that, for today, lies hidden underneath of the EcoView EMS product line.

Try, try again...

We've all heard it said: You just cant please everyone. Like most people I recognize the basic truth behind this statement - at least in the general sense. The struggle I often have, however, is in discerning when negative feedback from a customer warrants a re-think of some feature or service and when it is best to hold the line. This is the situation that we have been confronted with following the release of EcoView Web Commercial version 2.0.

As can be expected with any major product update, we have gotten a handful of complaints and criticisms about version 2.0 of our EcoView Web Commercial product, released in May of this year. This is our web-based application that allows customers to manage and configure commercial sites (restaurants, convenience stores, small offices, etc.) that have been outfitted with our EcoView Commercial energy management system. I've heard adjectives like clunky, confusing and, possibly worst of all, ".. an engineer's dream.." - ouch. In my own defense I have to say that the handful of customers that I was listening to when designing this version absolutely love the thing now that it is available. I will be the first to admit, however, that this probably isn't simply a case of not being able to please everyone. I do see where some users find the interface intimating and less than intuitive. The thing is, a lot of work and innovation went into making it look and feel exactly as it does - allow me to explain.


EcoView Web Commercial version 1.0 was the first release of our multi-site, energy management web application. It was pretty simple and lacked a lot of features that customers were expecting. Now in hindsight I have to admit that I never actually heard any serious complaints about the basic usability. Even so, it was clearly a version 1.0 effort and as such served admirably for the first full 2 years of the EcoView Commercial product evolution. The negative comment I did hear from a few of our key customers, however, related to EcoView Web being too "website-ish" and not enough like the more traditional energy management applications that they were used to. These "traditional" EMS applications, I will point out, are Windows desktop applications that you use from a single PC installed on the site somewhere. Since our primary user interface is web based, getting that desktop look and feel was a pretty big challenge. I think we got most of the way there with version 2.0 (see below screenshot).

This decidedly Windows desktop look was modeled after some of the more popular EMS applications that I have worked with over the years. You have a tree view on the left to select sites from, a dashboard in the middle to interact with selected sites and a property grid on the right to make adjustments to devices (thermostats, lighting, etc.). There are lots of other screens and features, including a very nifty graphing interface, but overall the general theme follows the same basic look and feel. Functional yes, sexy no. And, apparently, style counts for something after all - just ask Apple.

So I am sure you weren't expecting me to just cop to not quite meeting the mark with this product release and leave it at that. Indeed I have no intention of it. I am using this blog entry, rather, to announce that we have already began work on EcoView Web 3.0 and will be taking a decidedly different tact on this development exercise than was taken on our journey to version 2.0. For starters, we are going to be selecting several key customers to preview primary user-interface concepts prior to setting them in stone. This will take the form of a technology preview web site that selected users can poke at and give us feedback about what they think works and what doesn't. The obvious intent is to help us incorporate user feedback during the actual design and development phase rather than after the official release. What a concept eh?

Not to spoil the surprise for those users that will get a sneak-peak in the near future, but one of the key design concepts that we are exploring for the main user interface is a map-based site selector. For me this just makes perfect sense - rather than pick your sites from a list of some sort when you want to make adjustments or view current status, you select them from a map (think Google Maps) with pushpins representing your sites. This alleviates many of the problems associated with grouping sites when you have them spread across the country and also allows the pushpins to provide summary information to allow for quick review and assessment. It also just looks really, really cool. Sorry, no screenshots just yet but I really think that pretty much everyone will find this approach very intuitive and functional.

If you are a current customer that would like to participate in the EcoView Web Commercial 3.0 technology preview, please let your salesperson know about it and I will contact you to make the necessary arrangements. I'd like to get a few lovers and a few haters of version 2.0 to make sure that all points of view are represented in this.

One thing that I have learned over the years is that product development is subject to the same basic laws of natural selection that biology is. There is never a finished form, only ongoing evolution and adaption to changing needs. And so we take another shot at perhaps not pleasing everyone, but definitely achieving broader appeal for our customers and users of EcoView Web Commercial.

Apps, Apps Everywhere Apps

In late Q2 of this year we were hard at work finalizing design elements related to the release of our EcoView Residential product when someone in the team suggested the concept of "Apps" for the touchscreen page set. Its not the first time that we have considered incorporating this popular paradigm into the residential product, but a set of circumstances related to supporting extended features such as weather, traffic, etc. led us to finally adopt this approach moving forward. We are currently set to release EcoView Residential on Sept 1 of this year and the production screen set will include an EcoView Apps page where future content will be available. Users will be able to log into the EcoView Residential web portal and select the Apps that they would like to have available. Apps are essentially software components that will be managed and delivered by our Internet server system.

Initially I saw little value in introducing the Apps concept into our EcoView Commercial screens but recently the idea has gained momentum and we are now working on adding this feature to our commercial product as well. Obviously Apps like weather, traffic, etc. have little appeal for a touchscreen located in a place of business, but a little brainstorming revealed at least one compelling App that would make sense in a restaurant, convenience store or retail shop. This first commercial App will consist of an employee time clock interface where employees can key-in their ID upon arriving at and leaving work. Our Internet server systems will record this data and make it available to management in the form of reports and down-loadable files. This is essentially an Internet-enabled version of the old mechanical punch-clock units that are still widely used today. We are currently vetting out at least one more App to introduce to our EcoView Commercial product - stay tuned for more details.

Much like Apps found in other products (i.e. smart phones), EcoView Apps will be consist of a mixture of free and paid add-on features. Some will simply be information displays, such as weather and traffic and some will be full blown independent applications such as the punch-clock App described above. In most, if not all, cases the product owner will be able to select which Apps are available at the touchscreen. This will be done through the associated product web portals.

I have included a mocked-up screenshot of the EcoView Residential Apps screen in this post. Note that the content providers shown are for concept/illustrative purposes only and do not represent Apps that are currently available as part of the EcoView product. In some cases commercial relationships with these providers are yet to be established.