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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From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given the landscape you have described and the fact that many of the startups are already thinning out, I believe that you will be getting acquisition offers from the ERP crowd as they look to move into this space.

Neno Duplan: You are right, and we already have started to get those offers. This is not the time to sell the company. The stars have aligned incredibly well for us. In 2000 when all the startups came online, we saw a downturn come and wipe them out. Now we have a mirror image of that happening all over again. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Today when a prospect is evaluating vendors, are you always at the table?

Neno Duplan: The majority of the time we are. We use guerrilla marketing to our advantage now. A lot of the companies in our space assumed they were the market leaders and they put a lot of money into advertising campaigns to essentially build awareness of the environmental management, energy management and carbon management. What they did not realize is that companies like us have been doing this for 10 years, so we just let them build overall awareness, and then we compete against them for actual contracts. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of what you were selling? Were you offering company specific information, or was it an Internet front end to a centralized data store?

Neno Duplan: It was centralized web-based model based entirely on multi-tenancy. We had a single database for every client but a common interface. The database was common, but the data was coming from different sources. This allowed for us to segregate company data to ensure they could not see each other’s data. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did you initially go to market with? Was your initial offering an Internet portal for environmental data or was it consulting?

Neno Duplan: We did not have a product or software offering. We had five employees and we used our collective connections to do environmental consulting. We were working on projects where we helped companies characterize contaminants for their federal reporting requirements. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 1997 you recognized the potential for the Internet to be the front end interface to large amounts of data. What was your next step?

Neno Duplan: That led to the beginning of Locus, which I founded in 1997. We had more domain expertise than anyone else in the world. I then set out to develop a web-based application which would organize all of the environmental data information that various companies had. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What types of companies were generating the large amounts of environmental data?

Neno Duplan: Consulting engineering firms working for Chevron or oil companies. Almost every gas station on every corner can be considered a contaminated site because almost every underground storage container at those gas stations has leaked at some point. >>>

From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 1)

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Neno Duplan is the founder, president, and CEO of Locus Technologies, a provider of on-demand environmental data and information management solutions. Prior to starting Locus Technologies, Dr. Duplan held senior management positions with Canonie Environmental (W.R. Grace Company), The IT Group and D’Appolonia Consulting Engineers. Dr. Duplan holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, an M.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Split, Croatia. He also attended advanced management training at Stanford University.

Sramana Mitra: Neno, tell me a bit about your background. Where do you come from?

Neno Duplan: I was born in Croatia, which used to be Yugoslavia. I grew up on the Adriatic. After I graduated from college, I got a job with an American company in Italy. >>>