The energy business model has been simple for a long time – produce more energy, then sell more energy. Tendril is aiming to change that with the powerful combination of data and product marketing.  The Boulder, Colorado company is using data to improve online customer experiences and leverage information about customer behavior.  The platform is known as Energy Services Management (ESM) and is designed to open new revenue streams for energy companies through data intelligence.

How can energy companies capitalize on these potential revenue streams produced by this micro targeting of data? Tendril collects information about energy consumption and correlates it with publicly available information from services like Experian.  That information is then analyzed within the Tendril platform’s Big Data and analytics model, composed of Hadoop technology, analytics and the merging of public and utility data.

Energy consumers have largely been an untapped analytics market and these marketing-focused customer profiles are valuable to vendors that sell services and equipment to these customers.   The value lies in behavioral information, which integrates such elements as gamification, spending behavior, utility spending and home size.  Consumers gain insight, choice and control over their energy use.   Tendril has partnered with such companies as BMW and Hitachi to ply those companies respective benefits in smart energy initiatives.

Tendril’s Senior Vice President of Sales, Marie Bahl McKenna, described in a briefing how the traditional business model for energy providers has been a challenge, and that Tendril is enabling a consumer-oriented and personalized service model to change that business model.  It’s a landscape that alternative energy companies have helped change as well, bringing with it the innovations of modern technology to a century-old industry.

 McKenna states, “Old rules don’t apply anymore, there’s a big future in delivering personalized energy services and in any emerging technology there will be early adopters who break away from the pack and those who end up trying to catch up.”

The energy industry is often described as vulnerable on cybersecurity measures.  A lot of that characterization has to do with being a highly targeted industry, but also attributed to legacy control systems that are rarely updated.

McKenna emphasizes the company’s security take, “We take data security very seriously, which is why we employ strict security controls at every layer from physical, system and network security to data and application security.” Tendril’s type of technology focuses on customer information only, and is cloud-based. There are no infrastructure or any physical control systems that are in the line of security here, and that gives observers reason to know that weak security characterizations that affect the industry in general don’t really apply here.  Tendril applies complete segregation and privacy of customer data by implementing tiered data security zones, end-to-end encryption and role-based access control.

While the industry has existed for decades, it has had little reason to change much over time, especially when it came to computer technology. Reaching into this untapped consumer potential using the technology of big data, analytics and the power of information, the industry could see rapid transformation.

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