Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your entire customer base, who are some of the off-the-chart leaders in adopting this kind of optimization?

Danny Yu: We can look at folks like United Stationers, an office products distributor. They have an office facility and also have some warehouse distribution. We’re deployed in a project with them where we are controlling every single LED light fixture on, what we call, a granular basis. Every fixture can be controlled discreetly. If you have a specific light over your head, you can control that specific light. Why is that project interesting? There are several factors. One is the amount of energy savings we achieve through converting from old fluorescent technology to LED plus controls. It’s over 90% energy savings. That’s a tremendous amount.

The second part is the ability to control each specific fixture. This allows you to personalize your work space. We actually have a range of light levels that people set depending on personal preference. Computer jockeys, who like it dark so they can have maximum contrast, set it very low. People who work with paper keep it bright. The whole point of this is you’re ensuring occupant comfort, which leads to better productivity. You can’t do that with traditional lighting. That’s where we can go with that Internet of Things approach. You get down the end device. There’s energy savings associated with this as well as the control and the value of comfort and productivity associated.

Sramana Mitra: You’re going in with the energy savings value proposition. In the process of rolling things out, you’re coming up with side benefits.

Danny Yu: I would say surprises. That’s a good example of a very granular lighting control specifically as to how lighting is going to give me additional benefits besides energy savings. Another case is National Bank of Arizona where we are controlling the lights and thermostat. We’ve integrated a solution that effectively would have been two standalone solutions in the facility. The lights would have a separate control system and the thermostat would have its own control. They were able to combine the system.

Frankly, the customer found our user interface to be very intuitive compared to alternatives. The open standards integration allows multiple devices to work on the same system and then add software that takes advantage of current generation user interfaces, which allow for a better management and control of the facility. That’s more of the cross-application example. Another one that I want to talk about is a logistics company that has implemented not only lighting control but also other types of controls including managing fans and other devices that effectively, when you do the ROI analysis, you end up saying that the ROI analysis came more from these other things that were operational than saving money on the lighting control, which we also implemented because the open architecture allowed us to effectively co-create a customized solution for that customer that met their specific applications.

Sramana Mitra: What were those other things that they wanted to control?

Danny Yu: Fans, heaters, and other things that have not been connected in these devices because there has never been network solutions in these facilities. It’s like Oklahoma land rush. These companies have had all these operational energy opportunities that just haven’t been served because the architecture and the solutions were so last generation. It allows us to get the platform into the customer on a project that has ROI out of the gate. Because of the open standards and our scalability, we can road map with them for their future.

Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with Enlighted? What are the commonalities and differences?

Danny Yu: There’s probably three venture-backed companies.

Sramana Mitra: Are you a venture-backed company?

Danny Yu: Yes, we have a venture capital firm called Jolimont. The way that we see competition more broadly is they are proprietary in terms of their implementation, which means that open architecture that uses third-party end devices having open standards technology embedded is not their solution.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree
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