Back in the 80's when the famous American sitcom "The Jetsons" set in 2062, featured robot housekeepers and ozone-scraping luxury smart homes, viewers across all age-groups were enraptured with this depiction of a utopian future. Fast forward a few years and what was predicted for 50 years from now is very much a reality today in smart cities. Amazon's Alexa, the virtual assistant is a household name and the transformative power of IoT with 5G is reimagining urban development like never before. Research by IDC even indicates that smart city initiatives which attracted technology investments worth $81 billion in 2018, is expected to shoot up to a whopping $158 billion in 2022.
Making this vision for the smart future possible is Trilliant, a global provider of connectivity solutions with more than 28 million endpoints in deployment in 17 countries. Specialists in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and smart cities, Trilliant enables actionable intelligence with an open and secure communications platform. Their advanced technologies are designed to work with virtually any system to provide a scalable, secure, powerful source of data, today and for generations to come.
Founded in 2004, Trilliant hit its very first milestone early on, when in the very first two years of its existence, they initiated a rollout of 1.3 million smart meters to a utility company. Behind Trilliant's passion and year on year success is Andy White, chairman and CEO of Trilliant who brings over three decades of experience in the utility, energy, networks and communications industries. Prior to Trilliant, White has been associated with industry bigwigs such as General Electric as the President. Clearly, with strong leadership behind the company, it's evident that Trilliant is the smart way to smart cities.
Materializing the Urban Development Vision
The company brings to the table a multi-technology, global solution approach that gives utility companies and government bodies the flexibility to securely scale smart cities with plug-and-play connectivity. For starters, Trilliant's Smart Grid Communications platform empowers utilities with meter-independent and two-way communications across the energy value chain. The company's UnitySuite platform is a secure management platform that acts as a control center for all device interactions and facilitates scalable management of multiple smart grid communications technologies with unified business process integration. Supporting millions of endpoints across multiple device vendors, models, firmware versions, protocols, and communications methods, UnitySuite enables organizations to operate and control all smart grid communications from meters, in-home devices, and distribution devices through a single, unified dashboard. Data and analytics is no doubt the end all in modern business strategy today. Keeping that in mind, UnitySuite comes with a business intelligence module which comprises a fully customizable software suite and provides a single pane view of all data. Trilliant's deep analytics helps utilities ace system modeling, asset optimization, outage management, distributed energy management, and grid optimization.
Taking management of distribution grids a notch further, the company’s SecureMesh WAN provides a cost-effective broadband networking solution to enable communications throughout the entire distribution grid. This, in turn, helps improve voltage monitoring, substation automation, fault detection, identification, and recovery, as well as transformer monitoring. Through a patented wireless mesh system, the standards-based SecureMesh WAN can connect grid devices with high capacity and low latency links.
Since next-gen electric, water, and gas metering applications are the first step toward realizing the smart grid and smart city vision, Trilliant brings to bear an advanced meter infrastructure solution. Through this one-of-a-kind metering platform, companies can achieve timely and accurate billing, manage outages, provide superior customer service and response times, and all this while improving ROI and lowering the cost of ownership. Another unique offering by the company is its end-to-end Demand Response solution. Facilitating consumer behavioral demand response and load control as well as Demand Response using energy management tools for large commercial and industrial customers, Trilliant significantly improves visibility and balance between power generation and consumption.
Making this vision for the smart future possible is Trilliant, a global provider of connectivity solutions with more than 28 million endpoints in deployment in 17 countries. Specialists in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and smart cities, Trilliant enables actionable intelligence with an open and secure communications platform. Their advanced technologies are designed to work with virtually any system to provide a scalable, secure, powerful source of data, today and for generations to come.
Founded in 2004, Trilliant hit its very first milestone early on, when in the very first two years of its existence, they initiated a rollout of 1.3 million smart meters to a utility company. Behind Trilliant's passion and year on year success is Andy White, chairman and CEO of Trilliant who brings over three decades of experience in the utility, energy, networks and communications industries. Prior to Trilliant, White has been associated with industry bigwigs such as General Electric as the President. Clearly, with strong leadership behind the company, it's evident that Trilliant is the smart way to smart cities.
Materializing the Urban Development Vision
The company brings to the table a multi-technology, global solution approach that gives utility companies and government bodies the flexibility to securely scale smart cities with plug-and-play connectivity. For starters, Trilliant's Smart Grid Communications platform empowers utilities with meter-independent and two-way communications across the energy value chain. The company's UnitySuite platform is a secure management platform that acts as a control center for all device interactions and facilitates scalable management of multiple smart grid communications technologies with unified business process integration. Supporting millions of endpoints across multiple device vendors, models, firmware versions, protocols, and communications methods, UnitySuite enables organizations to operate and control all smart grid communications from meters, in-home devices, and distribution devices through a single, unified dashboard. Data and analytics is no doubt the end all in modern business strategy today. Keeping that in mind, UnitySuite comes with a business intelligence module which comprises a fully customizable software suite and provides a single pane view of all data. Trilliant's deep analytics helps utilities ace system modeling, asset optimization, outage management, distributed energy management, and grid optimization.
Taking management of distribution grids a notch further, the company’s SecureMesh WAN provides a cost-effective broadband networking solution to enable communications throughout the entire distribution grid. This, in turn, helps improve voltage monitoring, substation automation, fault detection, identification, and recovery, as well as transformer monitoring. Through a patented wireless mesh system, the standards-based SecureMesh WAN can connect grid devices with high capacity and low latency links.
Since next-gen electric, water, and gas metering applications are the first step toward realizing the smart grid and smart city vision, Trilliant brings to bear an advanced meter infrastructure solution. Through this one-of-a-kind metering platform, companies can achieve timely and accurate billing, manage outages, provide superior customer service and response times, and all this while improving ROI and lowering the cost of ownership. Another unique offering by the company is its end-to-end Demand Response solution. Facilitating consumer behavioral demand response and load control as well as Demand Response using energy management tools for large commercial and industrial customers, Trilliant significantly improves visibility and balance between power generation and consumption.
Specialists in (IIoT) and smart cities, Trilliant enables actionable intelligence with an open and secure communications platform
When it comes to smart cities, one advantage that's hard to miss is connected street lights. Chicago’s initiative to replace 270,000 city lights over the next four years with LEDs and intelligent controls is an apt example of the growing scale and ambition of street lighting projects. Experts believe that this step could eventually save Chicago $10 million a year in energy costs. As such, Trilliant's Tool Less Sensor Platform (TSP), a field swappable sensor platform that is installed on top of a street light node is the best fit when it comes to intelligent lighting. The platform allows users to manage their street lighting assets with real-time visibility, which in turn paves way for condition-based maintenance and remote operation. “Smart street lighting can produce substantial benefits for communities—including increased efficiency, additional revenue, improved sustainability, and greater safety for residents,” says White. Going one step ahead, TSP is an extensible platform and on client request, additional sensors can be fitted on to the platform for air quality, security video, traffic counting, autonomous vehicle assistance, and other communications. The advantages with TSP are truly limitless as it provides additional energy savings, load shifting and balancing, and detailed reports on energy.
The Smart Journey
Trilliant has led pioneering smart city projects around the world including Vietnam’s first advanced metering smart network. Vietnam is experiencing over eight percent annual energy demand growth, and Trilliant's smart city solution is not only expected to improve energy efficiency but render Ho Chi Minh City the 'Silicon Valley of the Pacific.' In this case, Trilliant worked on an intelligent system of LED lights, together with controls and a smart city management platform. The smart lighting system was communicated over the existing AMI network owned by the electric utility of Ho Chi Minh City. Sensors were retrofitted on the smart lighting, which offered a multitude of new city services, including public safety applications, air quality monitoring, EV charging, and smart parking. Trilliant's platform also delivered a range of innovative smart solutions, providing the Saigon Hi-Tech Park with additional revenue, improved sustainability, greater safety for residents, and an incentive for attracting new residents and businesses.
Constantly looking at ways to innovate, recently the company introduced a cutting-edge site surveying tool utilizing drone technology to improve efficiency across field related processes. Existing site survey processes in the market are laborious, expensive, and often inadequate resulting in imprecise positioning and difficulty replicating installation locations. Trilliant's advanced drone technology and highly portable tool performs surveys and inspections that drastically improve the quality, efficiency, and speed of surveying.
To handle complex integrations and innovation, the company closely works with an extensive global partner network, which significantly reduces operational downtime. For example, their collaboration with analytics leader SAS has enabled Trilliant to optimize connected grid devices and turn data into actionable intelligence. Together SAS and Trilliant are exploring vast amounts of raw, low-latency meter and device data to help utilities improve profits and reduce power outages. The juggernauts are analyzing valuable use cases such as determining which devices or meters have anomalous consumption behavior patterns, and the data is being evaluated to determine correlation within model type or manufacturer. The endeavor involves integrating with SAS’ streaming analytics software and the combined capabilities ensure that organizations receive unparalleled value.
Going forward, Trilliant is planning to expand their services specifically in the Asia Pacific region. The company has placed big bets on technology development to precisely align with the needs of the market. Utilities are mostly concerned with the total cost of ownership and the risk factor that accompanies large-scale deployment, and Trilliant's end-to-end communications solutions, purpose-built for the utilities is the perfect fit.
