The entrepreneur talks are usually tagged My Story sessions at TiE. Vinay started off by professing that it is our Story – so we heard about how he and his 3 partners together have built this company. Vinay’s dad was a marketing manager at Cummins India Ltd. Vinay has done his Compnter Science engineering. His first venture was a company in the videoconferencing space. This was taken over by NVidia – and they went on to transform this company into NVidia India. After the first stint of entrepreneurship, Vinay went back to a job – following his dad’s footsteps by becoming a marketing manager at Persistent Systems, one of the pioneers in the IoT space.

IoT is actually an integration of 8-9 disciplines. A conventional example of  IoT use is remote server management, Companies like Blade Logic are managing upwards of 10,000 servers. One of the big opportunities in IoT is industrial equipment. Only about 5% of machines are connected today. Companies like Schneider are already in this space – but they are restricted to informing operators and not management. Vinay thought that getting these machines into a single platform was where the moolah was. It took Altizon 3 months to get the first prototype ready. This was used to get buy-in from a customer. It took another 3 months to get a more professional version ready. In order to ensure the security of the data, Chinese walls were put between the app developers and the platform team. Today Altizon has about 106 customers in 31 countries. The promise that Altizon makes to its customers is that there will be no losses because of any major breakdowns. Also they promise a 10% improvement in OE: Machine availability, energy utilisation and performance quality.

The first 2 years, 2013 to 2015, were focused on the manufacturing sector in Pune. This was the time a self service layer was added to the platform. 500 developer accounts got created, but unfortunately not too many of them were active. Wipro was one of the earliest users. Out of a team of 30, 3 people are domain experts – in the areas of instrumentation, production and management. The vision is to have a lot of apps built, based on the Altizon platform. Some of the ideas for the apps: a predictable maintenance algorithm for pumps, Throughput quality prediction.

GE has been making a lot of noise off late about connected machines. This has helped Altizon as they now have to do less of preaching. Germany has already passed a legislation to get the connected machines onto a standard – Kodeko. This should make it much easier to connect equipment. Yet the reality is that standards always lag the problems. So Altizon started with Tier 3 suppliers – and worked their way up. The pricing plan is SaaS.

Vinay’s parting advice was never sell a technology to a customer. At the initial stage of a company’s operations generalists make a huge difference – as they are not married to any technology. He recommends reading this book – ‘The Hard Things about Hard things’ by Horowitz. Could not find a pdf about the book online – but here are his blogs in pdf form: https://a16z.com/2016/09/04/ben-blog-ebook/

Here is the company website – www.altizon.com