By V. Sankara Narayanan, Senior Research Analyst, Frost & Sullivan

Gary Ambrosino

Gary Ambrosino joined Sensicast in 2006 as President and CEO. He has extensive experience in the wireless networking, M2M and on-line media industries as an executive in venture-backed startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. Prior to joining Sensicast, Gary was EVP of worldwide sales at Cognio, a wireless RF sensor semiconductor company. Previously, he was CEO and Co-Founder of Secure Media, a leading San Francisco-based streaming media encryption systems company. Earlier, Gary was VP of Marketing and Business Development for Xionics, where he played a key role in driving the company's growth from a small start-up to a NASDAQ listed public company. Gary also spent 8 years at Hewlett-Packard, where he was Director of Product Management for PC software products. Gary holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

Gary Ambrosino: The number one factor contributing to Sensicast’s success is that we deliver end-to-end wireless sensor network systems to end users. Sensicast builds systems that work out of the box to power mission-critical end user applications. Rather than sell systems components that require integration (as most of our competitors do) we deliver a complete turnkey system that is pre-integrated and works upon installation.

Gary Ambrosino: Two reasons. First, we are able to clearly demonstrate a significant Return-on-Investment (ROI) associated with installing the system. The economics of using a Sensicast system meets or exceeds the internal rate of return that our customers demand for investments associated with productivity improvements. This isn’t true for wired sensor networks from large manufacturers like Emerson, Siemens, GE, and Honeywell whose sensing solutions are 5-10 times more expensive than a Sensicast product to purchase, install and operate. Second our product, SensiNet, adds unique business value. An example of our added "business value" is the benefit that customers get from using our solutions for temperature and humidity monitoring. Facilitating accurate, remote readings of temperature level is important to pharmaceutical manufacturers because it helps them to comply with FDA regulations. Similarly, processors of perishables like food and beverages, even manufacturers of explosives in rocket motors today depend on Sensicast for temperature and humidity monitoring.

Another area that is very important for us has been energy use reduction in compressed air systems. In a big plant like a car factory the cost of compressed air alone can be an operating expense equal to $10.0 million of power on an annual basis. Running the SensiNet system in these installations has demonstrated electricity use reductions of up to 20.0 percent. Realizing a 20 percent reduction on a $10.0 million electric bill using a system that costs $200,000 generates a 10 X return on investment and provides a payback on the system in less than 3 months. That is compelling!

Gary Ambrosino: Correct. The savings are immediately evident. Here’s another interesting example, we have a life sciences customer who houses hundreds of genetically-modified rats in specially designed cages. These rats are used in experiments and cost $10,000 each, so the maintaining their health is very important. Each cage is individually ventilated to isolate air in that cage—but in the past, sometimes the ventilation wasn’t working—which degraded the air quality and raised the temperature in the cage. When that happened—rats would die. To solve their problem, our customer installed SensiNet to monitor airflow to every cage as well as and temperature and humidity conditions inside each cage. Now, an alarm goes off if there’s any environmental change. The rate of rat mortality has dropped to zero since the system was installed. Thus a $30,000 investment saves $120,000 a year and the payback happens within months. Again, an example of how SensiNet creates immediate value.

Gary Ambrosino: We have just recently entered the market for water damage mitigation. Insurance companies and services that do cleanup in commercial and residential buildings are very interested in knowing the condition of flooded and moisture-damaged facilities. Using Sensicast for remote moisture management, saves labor and equipment costs and accelerates the remediation process.

In this application SensiNet is installed on a job site and remotely and automatically monitors cleanup conditions. Data is sent directly to the insurance company who reimburses the service provider based on job progress. This is a tremendous benefit to the insurance industry in terms of setting standardized reimbursement metrics and also in managing risk.

Gary Ambrosino: At present, Sensicast is principally focused on North America, with some business in Europe. We’ve seen tremendous interest in our technology in China and we are actively seeking a strategic partner to work with there in delivering our products.

Gary Ambrosino: To be honest with you, I think it is not what people expect. I joined Sensicast Systems a year ago as CEO and I previously ran a company that did wireless networking and chipsets and I have not been in industrial automation area before.

When I first came in here, I think the perception was that wireless sensor networking companies are really in the industrial automation area. That tends to be true in the traditional applications and that industry moves gracefully slow especially in the uptake of new technologies.

On the other hand, we are experiencing tremendous growth that I attribute to the emergence of a new area that been enabled by the lower cost, ease of installation, and network integration capabilities offered by wireless sensing systems like our product SensiNet. Now, information-intensive manufacturing, storage, and validation applications can make use of sensing to collect data that was previously hard to collect because of physical limitations or because wired sensing systems cost too much.

We’ve coined a term for this market segment - - "Commercial Industrial" and find information-intensive manufacturing companies in the pharmaceutical, life sciences, and food industries are our best customers.

Gary Ambrosino: Our Company is committed to building a complete, end-to-end system that we can offer as a single vendor solution. That is not a simple thing to do. Integrating a range of different technologies into several network tiers, while ensuring transparent connectivity with both internal IT infrastructure and externally to the Web, is an engineering challenge as you might imagine. Our marketing message is simply the expression of our product philosophy and day-to-day business. Customers want a system that is easy to install, operate and works with the systems they already have with a minimum of effort. So that’s what we give them.

The alternative (buying a gateway and sensors from different sources, and then try to make those work together) is painful. Trying to find application software that works with those components and integrating the sensor probes is complicated and requires additional software engineering. When customers learn that they can open the box, install and operate a Sensicast network in under a day--- our approach becomes more attractive.

Gary Ambrosino: Absolutely correct. Many of our customers install large deployments of our SensiNet wireless sensor network product on their own, with minimal handholding from Sensicast. A typical network of 50 measurement points can be set up and configured in under half a day. Since the system is pre-integrated with most standard automation software packages, the network can be put to work immediately and the benefits start as soon as the system is switched on.

Gary Ambrosino: We have over 100 end user customers around the world using our SensiNet product in mission critical applications. Our strategic partners include GE with whom we’ve collaborated for several years on a large Department of Energy project that has lead to our involvement in energy reduction applications for compressed air systems. In addition, GE resells our products for a number of applications. We also have installations in over 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers including some of the most recognizable names in that industry.

Gary Ambrosino: We have definitely seen just the tip of the iceberg at this point.

I am very pleased that Sensicast has received a great deal of industry recognition as a leader in the segment and we are very happy with the level of customer satisfaction we have generated. In the near term, our challenge is to ramp up our operations to support the level of business and the increasing number of installations in which we’re engaged. I also expect that our next generation product line will have a sweeping impact on the industry and deliver another order of magnitude of productivity improvement for our customers.