Power, energy management for sustainable future
BENGALURU: Vigyanlabs was started with the vision to provide energy saving solutions from an information technology standpoint. This energy management company has multiple US patents for power management systems, and a computing device comprising a CPU, memory, persistent storage, operating system and communication mechanism.
They have also developed a technology, the Intelligent Power Management Platform (IPM+), which is a combination of hardware and software, which optimises the distribution and use of electrical power in data centres and computer systems. Srinivas Varadarajan, founder and CEO of Vigyanlabs, says, “IPM+ is running on more than 4.3 million devices worldwide, and has saved more than 660 GWH of energy till date.
IPM+ uses our own custommade artificial intelligence/machine learning models (AI/ML) that have proven to save more than 30 per cent of energy in large enterprises. In all, the technology is helpful for energy efficiency and sustainability domains.” “At the time of formation, we looked at the key problems facing our world, such as scarcity of water and energy, waste and transportation management, and identified the space we can help address given our skill-set.
We chose ‘Power Management of IT Infrastructure’ as our core business. The choice was on account of our expertise in the area of IT optimisation and high performance systems engineering. Our flagship product has been IPM+, to enable Intelligent Power Management in mobiles, PCs and data centres” he adds. He adds, “We are proud to be counting some of the largest banks and enterprises in India as our customers. We have 50 large enterprises and many small enterprises as our revenue generating customers. We are profitable and have broken even. Currently, we are focusing on medium and large enterprises, and also on group of companies.”
Talking about challenges faced, he says, “Playing in a domain where your solution is not a mandatory requirement to run a business is always a challenge. However, when enterprises started seeing tangible improvements and credible energy savings, things started changing for us.” “The second challenge is that most enterprises do not want to invest or test Indian start-ups, and would rather go with large, proven brands. We had to prove ourselves at each step to move ahead in this journey.
This apart, due to highly technical nature of the work we do, we always find it difficult to source candidates. However, we engage with universities early on and we found that getting interns and working to build them internally always worked well for us,” he adds. Talking about future plans, he says, “We are working on the next generation of our ‘Smart Internet of Things’ (SmartIoT) platform, which integrates predictive analytics to help predict, manage and optimise smart energy metering and smart city problems. We are already working with several Indian and US customers to pilot and test drive the solution.
We are also working on optimising our flagship IPM+ platform for IT infrastructure to make it more adaptive and self managed using further advanced AI-based models.” “The proprietary US patents also cover adaptive power management and peak power management in an efficient manner. We already have a ‘Smart Internet of Things’ (Smart- IoT) platform focused on energy domain catering to fine grained data collection, analysis, prediction, control and monitoring of UPS, virtualised data centre environments, printers, smart energy metres and Industrial HVAC systems,” he adds.