Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 6)

Martin Manniche: The companies said, “We don’t own the industrial design. So the product that we are getting out from our client partners could be the same that our competitors use. We don’t control the software inside it. We are giving a spec, but the software is owned and built by someone else. That means that every product we have will have different software.” The next point they said was, “It takes too long from starting a product until it hits the market. Everything that we do needs to go to the cloud.” That was very helpful, because that meant that we have a place to use our cloud platform. They wanted everything connected.

We had the experience of building consumer-related connectivity products for Linksys, Belkin, and Cisco. They wanted industrial design. I have a 12-people industrial design team. So we worked on a business model called the 360 business model where we first act as a consultant partner. We understand the pain point and design the product they want. We give them the ability to innovate. That became the foundation for our telco focus. That is really when Greenwave took off – 100% growth this year in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? It sounds like you’ve done quite a few configurations and your architecture has been able to flow through all these. How did that happen?

Martin Manniche: I am blessed to have a very talented end-to-end system architecture team where we can architect all the way from chipsets to the cloud. It’s an end-to-end architecture. We have changed the platform over those seven years. In smart grid, we saw that we were not moving a lot of data, but we were sending hundreds of millions of tiny data. If you couldn’t data mine and search fast, it was not really successful. Security is very tough. We needed to make sure that we got that right.

When we were touching the retail part, we needed to solve other points in the platform so we needed to add additional features to make it easy. One thing we can be very proud about is the basic foundation of how we architected upfront. The vision of how we wanted to do this has actually truly worked. When the company was founded, we spent the first four to five months considering all the different issues we need to look at and make sure that the foundation was done in a certain way.

That was the best investment I have ever done in Greenwave. Otherwise, we would have done one platform, thrown it away, and built another platform. Even though there have been areas that were refactored, the foundation was right. The vision of building a horizontal, managed services platform that can cut across different industries has absolutely been the reason why we have been able to scale the business to where we are today. It’s so easy for us to bring in new segments. Some people come and say, “How can you just go into this market? How can your platform be ready?” This was something we had already considered.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems
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