Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It takes time to fully deploy the solution. If you have one customer with 20 to 40 facilities, it takes time to get it fully deployed, right?

Danny Yu: Yes. The way this works with existing buildings is they typically want to do some type of an upgrade to the facility. You time yourself with capital budget around energy efficiency. If you do well and they like that, they will keep rolling it out. We have had one customer, in the grocery area, that went from talking through our channel partner in December 2013 to getting the first trial to a particular end customer of theirs. We did our trial in February 2914, and we received orders for 50 facilities about three months later. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me get a bit more granular in some of these steps. When you started getting the sense that there was this product opportunity while you were essentially acting as a reseller and system integrator on top of what became the Adobe technology, what was your business situation? You were a self-financed company. What kind of revenue levels were you pulling at that point? What year are we talking about?

Phil Copeland: We started Avoka in late 2002. By about 2011, we were probably up to $10 or $11 million in revenue through a lot of consulting services work. We used to sell some of the Adobe products as well as our own products. We’d grown that business from scratch to around $10 million in revenue. We were starting to get a small amount of money from selling our own product as well but it was relatively small in those early years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 1)

Cloud-based contact centers are an active space. Here’s an opportunity to get up to speed with the developments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s first introduce yourself to the audience as well as what you do in the company.

Mike Burkland: I’m the CEO of Five9. I joined here as CEO back in January, 2008 – over six years ago. Five9 was founded in 2001. We’re a leading pure cloud software provider to the call center market or, as we refer to it today, the contact center market. Five9 has over 2,000 businesses as clients. They run their contact centers on our cloud solution. They actually process, on an annual basis, about 3 billion customer interactions across the Five9 platform. When I joined, we were about $10 million in revenue. Now, >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are more of a service side?

Danny Yu: It was a network analysis product. By helping companies solve problems with networking, it gets us to understand the problem better because a test company has to understand the test cases. What effectively happened is we gathered all these expertise across all these different applications about what problems we need to solve at a system level to enable all these applications to work together. The company shifted to being the solutions platform company. The company then picked the lowest-hanging fruit of vertical application to go after, which was commercial lighting.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think the process that you’ve outlined is a very effective process. I’ve seen case study after case study where people have been successful in doing this. That’s to take some existing product that’s in the market, start selling and do some sort of a value-added reseller or system integration kind of partnership. That enables entrepreneurs to get close to customers, learn their problems, and then productize and build IP based on that knowledge. You’ve very clearly articulated a process that absolutely works. It’s a tried and true proven process.

Phil Copeland: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve run through this talk a few times. There’s a time and place too for getting venture-backed businesses, but I have to say that some of the worst disasters I’ve seen in businesses starting up are companies that have had too much money to start with. There was a classic company in Australia in the early 2000s that was backed by two really first-class >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 2)

Danny Yu: We have one application in retail. It’s a restaurant chain. They actually use a temperature sensor to detect whether or not their freezers have stayed cold. The reason why they do that is because if the power goes out and they’re not able to monitor and track the temperature of the freezer; then as per Federal Regulations, they have to throw out their food. That’s thousands of dollars. In this case, the sensors are located near the freezer.

Sramana Mitra: Double-clicking one more level down, how does a sensor pick-up occupancy? Temperature is easier.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Phil Copeland: There were a lot of lessons learned out of that. First of all, the original business was self-funded and was grown out of cash flow. Spot On was my first venture capital-based business, and it was also started in San Francisco. That was a really interesting experience. After that, I returned with my family to Sydney and once again, spent a bit of time wanting to start another technology business. I wanted one that was self-funded because after the dot-com boom, it was much harder to raise capital. Frankly, I was looking for a new idea for business that we could self-fund. It needed to earn money pretty much from the outset. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 1)

Enterprise Internet of Things is getting a lot of hype these days. I sat down with Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree, a company that is actually selling an energy management solution for controlling the energy usage at commercial facilities. Very interesting window into a segment of the industry that is likely to create a couple of very large companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a bit of context for our audience. Tell us about you and the company.

Danny Yu: DainTree is a provider of smart building control and energy management solutions. What we bring to our industry is the simplification of building energy management, which allows for tremendous energy and operational cost reduction and simplification of how enterprises run their business.

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