Page 174 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Web Technologies-II

Notes
to the company’s web tier, middleware tier, and data storage servers. The middleware tier,
which Advanced Telemetry built using Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005
data management software (since upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server 2008), is a complex
and extensible set of business rules that can be applied to the data to determine appropriate
responses and actions. For example, a customer could specify that if a temperature reaches
a certain threshold, the air conditioners will activate at a specific setting.
The touch panel displays real-time and historical usage data and stores the customer’s unique
business rules. Building managers can use the touch panel to set energy schedules and manage
energy consumption within a building, or regional managers can monitor and control many
buildings using the system’s web portal, called EcoView Web. Alternatively, customers can
have Advanced Telemetry perform the remote monitoring service on their behalf.

Low cost and easy to install, EcoView brings the benefits of sophisticated energy management
to medium and small buildings to dramatically reduce resource consumption. The product
was well received when it launched, and business grew steadily. Between October 2009
and November 2010, Advanced Telemetry doubled its customer base. Today, it serves 1,000
customers with a total of 2,000 installed sites that transmit approximately 150,000 unique
points of data every hour. This success, however, came with a price.
Breaking Ties to an IT Infrastructure
“Like most startups, we began with a single product and a local infrastructure, delivering
an end-to-end solution under a brand name, EcoView,” says Naylor. “In this model, we
were the manufacturer and did the marketing, channel development, and customer support
for ourselves.”
It quickly became clear that this business model, which entailed managing a local
infrastructure, was not a scalable or practical way for Advanced Telemetry to grow its
business. The EcoView Energy Management System generates a tremendous amount of
data, which it records to the middleware and data storage tiers. The bulk of the data is
historical information that consists of unique data points recorded at each customer site,
such as an energy demand change. The rest of the data is relational in nature, such as
customer configurations and metadata. Even though the historical data is more suited to
table storage, it ended up in the company’s SQL Server databases anyway because that was
the only database solution Advanced Telemetry had.
“We were forced to cull the data from the SQL Server databases because they were getting
so unwieldy, and we did not want to keep paying for more servers,” says Naylor. “We
were only able to store about six months of information. Naturally, we did not like to lose
information that could be useful for our customers in some way in the future.”
Advanced Telemetry came to see its reliance on a physical infrastructure as a major
impediment towards profitability, growth, agility, and even customer service. The company
moved its burgeoning amount of servers to a rack-mounted infrastructure hosted at a
collocation vendor, but even then, it was still concerned about the unavoidable link between
adding customers and paying for more rack space. Also, it was time consuming to set up a
customer on the system, a process that could take weeks of effort. Some EcoView customers
were unhappy about sharing their data servers with others, but Advanced Telemetry could not
afford to set up a single instance of its middleware and data storage for individual customers.
“It was too expensive and difficult for customers to have separate banks of servers that we
would remotely support,” says Naylor. “Looking forward, all we could see was the increasing
cost of maintaining an IT infrastructure eating into the profitability of our business. The
overhead that we were carrying to drive sales and provide support was not going to get us
around the corner as quickly as our investors wanted. We had to rethink our business model.”
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