Powering growth with scalable IoT

Building an economy that creates and preserves

GreenFlex helps companies and territories accelerate their sustainable development, decarbonization, and energy efficiency initiatives. To bring energy and low-carbon performance projects to life, GreenFlex designs and implements practical solutions that reduce its clients’ energy usage while improving performance. The company’s strategy integrates distributed Industrial IoT sensors to measure and control energy equipment.

GreenFlexIQ, the company’s digital platform for managing action plans, is a critical element of its success. With capabilities spanning analytics, remote monitoring, and control, GreenFlexIQ helps projects meet efficiency targets and save costs.

Previously, GreenFlex had built IoT capabilities into GreenFlexIQ to help it monitor and manage customer sites remotely. But quickly, “We realized we needed a new platform to support our ambitions,” says Arnaud Dejean, IoT Technical Director at GreenFlex. “First, we needed a platform for scalability to connect more devices for production management. Second, we wanted to make it easier for the operations team to set up and manage devices in the field more easily.”

Reliable, remote services through IoT

As GreenFlex looked for a new Internet of Things (IoT) solution, it prioritized partners that offered reliability and scalability out of the box. “Our main focus was finding a solution to make data acquisition low-cost and efficient across many customers,” says Dejean. “At this point in our search, we had already gained experience with two IoT platforms: one developed internally, the second based on a commercial solution.”

To make the best decision, the company built a list of criteria it wanted to meet:

• Modular, to connect with a wide range of existing environments and technologies.
• Agile, to support the ability to pilot new approaches and navigate changing market conditions.
• Scalable, for strong growth in current and future markets.
• Multi-country, to expand into multiple energy markets.
• Multifunction, to enable new technologies and business models.

Ultimately, GreenFlex identified Cumulocity as the optimal solution.

GreenFlex appreciated Cumulocity’s ability to listen to its needs, and to adapt the proposal and contract accordingly. With pricing simplicity, GreenFlex felt confident that it could grow its solution without incurring unexpected costs. And a 6-month calibration period, to establish specific service-level agreements, helped ease the transition after implementation.

Developers also loved Cumulocity —they found start-up was easy and administration simple. Streamlined device management and integration is especially valuable because GreenFlex is actively adding new projects, onboarding new teams, and updating client devices as projects evolve.

“For us, scalability is more about the range of connections we can add quickly, across different device and communication types, rather than just the number of IoT devices,” says Dejean.

With less training and development required, faster deployment, and simpler migration of existing devices, GreenFlex concluded that the total cost of ownership of Cumulocity would be lower than any other path forward.

Creating a low-carbon future, together

While Cumulocity was a strong contender out of the box, they offered training and customization that made it an overwhelming favorite.

Cumulocity’s Professional Services team helped GreenFlex get the most value from the IoT platform quickly and become self-sufficient. Developer training covered the company’s range of use cases and helped them implement solutions for the types of devices, connectivity, and remote monitoring and interventions that mattered most to GreenFlex customers.

GreenFlex field teams also received all the training they needed to operate in the field, setting up and modifying client projects efficiently. “Cumulocity helps us easily make dashboards for our client teams, and lets them operate independently,” says Dejean. “It would have been far more complicated to build these capabilities ourselves.”

Customization from Cumulocity’s Professional Service team makes the platform even more valuable by covering new use cases. Cumulocity helped integrate a new sensor type important to GreenFlex, collaborating on an open source project available to the wider IoT community. And collaboration on custom bulk operations helped GreenFlex reach over 1,000 operations per second. As a testament to the close relationship, Cumulocity manages the solution for GreenFlex—a step that improves performance and maintains the high level of trust GreenFlex places in its partner.

Now that GreenFlex can connect a wide range of customer devices across thousands of sites, Cumulocity is becoming a key part of the GreenFlexIQ product. With a stable, reliable connection, the company can track site performance in real time, take action remotely, and combine real time with historic data in new ways.

“We’re making strategic investments in new client-facing services, including for large customers with a wide range of needs, that simply wouldn’t be possible without the platform,” says Sébastien Trédan, Chief Technical and Data Officer, GreenFlex. Cumulocity also helps GreenFlex make the most of historic data as part of its Big Data initiatives. “Cumulocity is a key component of our strategy to internalize and validate the data we’ve gathered over the last decade,” says Trédan.

Cumulocity helps GreenFlex better meet customer needs and fulfill their mission to bring sustainable development, decarbonization, and energy efficiency projects to life.