Now that the big launch of JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) Version 3.0 is in full swing, we thought it would be a great time to touch base with Rene Seeber, CTO and Co-founder of JouleX. Rene is the driving force behind our incredible engineering team, and is “Always On!” That’s more than just a slogan for Rene, who has even been known to come into a meeting with a hand full of paper napkins covered in engineering notes because that was the only paper available during a dinner with colleagues the night before.
Describe what you do at JouleX.
Rene: My days at JouleX are always a good combination of strategic product planning and working directly on the product. I listen to customer needs and feedback, and work to find ways for JouleX to address those needs through product development. I spend a lot of time figuring out where we’re going in 1, 2, and 3 years but also ensuring that JouleX is a great platform today.
Tell me a little about the projects you’re currently working on:
Rene: Now that JEM Version 3.0 has been released, we’re working on putting concrete plans in place for the upcoming next two versions. Based on customer feedback and needs, we’re really working to make the next version even better than the great products we have today.
What in your past prepared you most for what you’re working on today?
Rene: Going through all of the ups and downs with a couple of startups before JouleX was probably the best experience I could have had for being successful with JouleX. My professional training obviously prepared me for the work we do, but I’ve been through everything in startups and that’s the best experience I’ve ever had.
Is there is any relation between how the technology you built at Cobion works and techniques used in JEM?
Rene: Absolutely. Cobion was one of the biggest influencers. Cobion processed images and data and indexed it. JouleX processes energy data and indexes it. All technology relates to others.
With Cobion, we approached “content security” as a large scale data processing problem, crawling billions of internet pages and images, doing distributed content analysis to classify web sites and created enterprise products out of the result.
With JouleX, it’s quite similar. We’re using advanced algorithms in combination with large-scale number crunching on a different kind of data source, in JouleX case it’s energy related sensor data (power, utilization, temperature, etc).
What moments stand out in your mind when thinking back over the young life of this (if we do say so ourselves!) pioneering company?
Rene: One moment that always stays with me was meeting with Tom Noonan (now JouleX president & CEO) and Tim McCormick (now JouleX vice president, sales & marketing) to present them with the idea for JouleX, and getting them excited about working together again with this new company. I will always remember that the day they said yes was one of the most perfect days.
Another was when we grew enough to start to hiring people we didn’t know and that we hadn’t worked with before. Taking that step was a huge moment for our company.
A little more than a year ago at the first company kick-off when everyone in the company was together for the first time. JouleX is unique in that our team members are all spread across the world, so it’s a big deal to have everyone together at once. It’s an incredibly precious time and it’s very exciting when we all come together.
How do want JouleX to be remembered 50 years from now?
Rene: In 48 years, I expect that JouleX as a company will be looking back on all of our accomplishments at our 50 year celebration. This company has the potential to be around for a long time. I don’t think of us as being remembered but still being very present in the world.
Finally, what kinds of hobbies fill your free time?
Rene: I don’t have free time. I only concentrate at one thing at a time and right now that’s JouleX. I have a wife and children and JouleX. Everything else is unimportant.
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1. Cisco launched EnergyWise in January 2009. What was the “Aha!” moment you had when you came up with the concept for EnergyWise?
There really wasn’t an “aha” moment. I’d been working at Cisco since 2000 and I worked on service provider platforms, routers that had power issues in central offices. We had to rethink how we designed power supplies and also how we addressed cooling. So, power has been at the forefront of a lot of the work I’ve done my entire time at Cisco.
In 2003/2004, I was working on the Catalyst 4500 Series, and we did the Power over Ethernet (PoE) launch. We spent a lot of time with customers talking about how to rewire wiring closets to produce enough electricity to run the PoE switch and I realized we needed a better strategy for managing energy on our platforms. This really evolved from a lot of different discussions but, it wasn’t until a little over four years ago that I was in a role that I could work with an engineering team that we could build some answers to those problems. That produced what we call EnergyWise today.
I think the biggest “aha” moment, or the closest thing to it, maybe 5 or 6 years ago thinking about how Cisco could help customers solve their energy challenges. We have a motto of “changing the way the world lives, works, plays, and learns.” Somebody has to dream up what that means and what those solutions look like. When I looked around Cisco, I realized a lot of us were working in our product silos and we weren’t thinking about the big ways to use the network. Some people were, but at one point I realized we need to start using the network to control energy or at least provide visibility to all of these systems within a facility, that the network is the unifying component, that it would be up to the network to help breakdown those barriers and move the solutions along.
2. Did it go back that far? 2003/2004 that you began thinking about energy?
Yes. With PoE, I ran into a customer that was converting a call center. They were building a new facility and building out a large call center in the facility. They came to us and said the way the PoE gets configured on a switch, we have to reserve the power whether it’s being used or not. We need to be able to statistically multiplex energy and know exactly how much energy was really going to be required. They needed granular control at the port level. The reason they needed this is when they added up all of what we call Reserved Power, they discovered they were going to have to pull more power into the building, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. Yet, on the product team, we knew they didn’t really need that much power. So we had to start building features that gave them visibility. We started the process with PoE.
3. What would you say your vision for EnergyWise was when you set out to create it? Has that evolved since then and if so how?
Once I got started on this, the vision quickly became if energy is the largest unmanaged expense then the end state is everything with a power cord. You should be able to measure it, whether the device reports the energy consumption or whether the outlet reports the energy consumption, you should have an idea how much energy is being used. You should understand how important that device is, and you should be able to control it in some way.
That’s what we set out to do and I think we’re moving in that direction. Ultimately, I think standards will evolve that will leverage the concepts, but that’s the goal. Now, it doesn’t make economic sense to enervate, or give energy intelligence to, some devices. Do you really need to know if there is a cell phone being charged off of an outlet if it’s only a couple of watts? Maybe not. But anything with intelligence or chips and firmware, we should give it a shot.
4. What IS Cisco EnergyWise and what is it NOT?
Cisco EnergyWise is a framework that leverages the network as a control plane for energy information and device information. It’s really just a way of collecting information about end devices in a simple way and passing that information up to a management API.
EnergyWise is a framework that allows the creativity of our ecosystem partners to really shine. It allows partners to build some great and innovative solutions. We can’t think of everything, and we’re certainly not going to try, but there are a lot of partners out there that can build great solutions for their markets. EnergyWise is a way to help them do that.
EnergyWise also allows disparate connected devices to report into a common framework up to a management station. So it acts, in a way, as a clearinghouse to help partners normalize energy information. Today there are very few standards in networking regarding power, so this is kind of a de facto standard or a way to help solve the problem before the standards actually get developed.
5. There has been a lot of discussion are frameworks and standards relating to energy measurement? Care to comment on any of the efforts underway?
I work in the standards space. I work on the NIST and I’ve worked some on the IEEE stuff. The NIST standard is focused on what I call the “Smart Load”. So, the ASHRAE/NEMA SPC 201 spec that is in development is really focused on helping building owners and building operators create an autonomous island of energy information. The building consumes energy and they consume it, report it, and control it in an autonomous way. And when the Smart Grid is ready, they can attach their information to the grid. If there’s real time pricing, they can make decisions based on that real time price, but what we’re doing is enervating the building. I keep saying Enervating. What I mean is that we’re giving it a central nervous system so that it becomes energy aware within the facility so that people can make better choices about the energy they are consuming.
That standard is still months away from being a standard. It’s more of an information model. EnergyWise is solving a problem that hasn’t been addressed. Within networking, there wasn’t a good way to do this in an effective way that normalized all of the information. EnergyWise solves that problem. I think there’s a lot of innovation that still has to take place. We have some ideas about some of this will shape up and what it will look like, but we’re constantly surprised by some of the things partners and customers come up with using it. That is then going to inform the group that makes the standards.
Everybody has to understand where it’s going before they build the roadmap and the standard is kind of the roadmap. I think for probably many more years we are going to be out ahead of the standard development because we’re going to be innovating and making up solutions as we go along.
6. Talk a little about the value of having visibility into energy usage?
The short answer is “You can’t control what you can’t see”. Energy is the largest unmanaged expense in an organization. We talk to customers and describe what’s possible with savings. In many commercial buildings you could probably save 20% by just having better visibility into where you’re wasting energy. Just having that visibility is so important. It’s the first step of energy management.
I think a lot of customers assume that if the building isn’t hot and it isn’t cold so it must be working just fine. As we’ve gotten into this, we’ve discovered there are all kinds of nuance around running a building that you can heat and cool at the same time so the occupant is comfortable and thinks everything is fine but the building is literally using 30-40% more energy than it needs to. So visibility is the start of every kind of sustainability program. Every sustainability program has to start with a view of where you’re starting.
7. In addition to visibility, you ensured that control was a capability of the EnergyWise protocol?
Reducing energy consumption was the ultimate goal. We started by looking at what the future would look like, and then we worked backward. If I think about a home or a commercial building or a data center, the future is about using energy in the most efficient way. In order to maximize the productive capacity of the facility and minimize the price or the cost of energy, you have to know what uses energy, when it uses it, why it uses it, how important it is so that you can start to time shift processes. You can also start to make better decisions about when you use energy.
Look at South Africa a few years ago or Japan today. Japan Today is a good example of a country that doesn’t have enough energy because of the shutdown of several nuclear plants. They don’t have enough electricity. As a society they have to start making tradeoffs. Do they run neon lights or do they run their trains? Do they run hospitals or do they run their train schedule the same way they did 6 months ago?
By having that granular visibility and also control, you can make decisions about tradeoffs. We don’t have unlimited energy. EnergyWise was really about ultimately giving people a way of identifying what was using energy, so key words, roles, being able to classify the devices and to be able to control them and tell them to shut off. If you don’t have enough electricity, do you really need that much light in the lobbies? Do you need to have spotlights on outside all the time? Probably not. The whole idea of EnergyWise was to be able to balance loads with available generation and to do it in real time in an automated way. That’s the end state. We’re working backward and trying to instrument everything. But, it is possible to do that with the technology.
8. What are the advantages to leveraging the network to instrument energy data? How is that better than using software agents or meters on every device?
There are many ways to do this. I would say the right way is the way that makes the best sense for a given customer. EnergyWise is a way of getting a lot of visibility. It’s a way of doing auto detect, auto configuration, keywords, importance. It’s a robust way to do it.
When I think of JouleX, building a management application, you are able to give management control to a device that typically wouldn’t have it. It’s a one to many, so the network can send out a query and say “send me your power state information” and all of the devices will send it back immediately, as opposed to one to one. It’s a way to certainly make it faster and easier and more scalable. From a metering perspective, a lot of hardware already has power measurement capabilities built in. It may be untapped or there’s no way to get it out to a centralized management station. This is a way of combining hundreds of different device types from hundreds of different manufacturers and passing it northbound through the API to a single management interfaces. It makes it easier in many cases. There are a lot of different ways to do it. We think this is a good, useful way of polling all of that information by leveraging the network.
We should have a common pane of glass when it comes to energy and energy related dashboards. You should be able to see all of the different systems in a building reported, from a power state, on a single pane of glass. That doesn’t mean an IT guy is going to control and set policies for all of those different domains, whether it’s the HVAC or lighting, etc., but they are going to see the energy because that’s how the executives are going to be able to have a consistent dashboard view so they can make better decisions. I still think it’s going to be up to the individual domains to set the policies. So we’ll have multiple policy engines but a single pane of glass when it comes to collecting energy use information.
9. How do you see JouleX fitting into this ecosystem Cisco has created for vendors with EnergyWise?
The switching team, the folks who made EnergyWise, we have a lot of ideas but we are not a network management organization. We built the API because we figured that there are people out there, much smarter than us, who can take the data and convert it into useful information. The framework from day one was built with a company like JouleX in mind to take the data and do something with it.
EnergyWise by itself in IOS is not a solution. It requires a client on the devices or at least awareness at the port level and it requires a management solution. So it's a critical piece of the total solution for customers.
10. What would you tell customers looking for a management platform for Cisco EnergyWise to consider before making a purchasing decision?
What I’d tell a customer is “Spend a lot of time thinking about what you want. What do you want to do? What information do you want to share?” It’s useful to think about having a way to show whole building energy consumption and then having a way to break it down into the subcomponents you can see and sub-meter by device. You should be able to group information by domain. You should be able to see how marketing compares to sales to finance to whatever. So you need a solution that is flexible and can leverage the capabilities that are embedded certainly in EnergyWise and anything else you might have in the system. Think about how you use that information to build leaderboards and to do benchmarking across facilities and to use all the functionality that’s there.
11. Finally, where do you see Cisco EnergyWise in the future? Say 10 years from now?
I see more and more customers deploying it so they have expanded visibility and also a deeper granular view of what’s going on. But I see EnergyWise as helping IT gain energy literacy and play an important role in expense management for the C level. Typically IT and network guys, when they’re doing their job well, nobody knows. Energy and energy visibility, it’s a way for them to show people “look, we’re saving you X”. It’s a way from them to show people what a great job they’re doing.
Ten years from now? I see buildings as power plants, net zero buildings, renewables, and buildings perfectly balanced with the grid, with more reliable power. I don’t know what role EnergyWise will play. I would imagine that we’ll have a standard by then. I don’t think anyone is going to throw away the work they’ve done. I think it’ll be an issue of translating the issue to whatever the standard is.
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