Invendis Technologies
is a global leader of manufacturing industrial internet of things (IIoT) hardware and software products. Founded in 2007, the Bangalore-based company has built a leading cloud interconnect platform combined with front end IoT gateways uniquely suited to meet the demand for monitoring remote assets globally. Invendis’ versatile solutions enable large infrastructure companies under telecommunications, industrial engineering, and energy to monitor, maintain and manage their distributed infrastructure. Invendis offers solutions for companies that could be at different stages of their operations ranging from start-ups with only a few towers to established enterprises with thousands of towers
“Besides making products, we also engage with customers to provide comprehensive services, ranging from solution designs to implementation, after sales, support services, and annual maintenance,” Rajeev Chintakayal, Invendis Director, Global Sales and Marketing, told Inside Towers from the company’s offices in Dubai. “We also provide application hosting, 24/7 monitoring services and analytics,” said Chintakayal. “Our solutions for workforce management include centralized software that tracks all activities related to the site, for example, event tracking, trouble tickets for corrective and preventive maintenance, access permission requests, access provisioning, and asset lifecycle tracking.”
Invendis started its business in the nascent stage of the telecommunications boom in India when the government of India issued 40+ licenses. The company identified this opportunity to pilot a remote monitoring system for a tower company. Within six months, Invendis received its first order to monitor 1,000+ cell sites from Ascend Telecom Infrastructure, followed by orders from Africa and southeast Asia. Today, Invendis monitors over 118,000 towers across 26 countries, with ATC India having the largest portfolio of 70,000 towers.
Invendis recently acquired two companies. One specializes in manufacturing energy meters and the other makes industrial IoT products. This highly complementary transaction expands Invendis’ addressable market, strengthens its customer base, and accelerates its leadership in IoT gateways/platforms and in the new generation 5G wireless infrastructure monitoring space.
Invendis serves three distinct capital-intensive industries — telecom, energy, and industrial automation — with complementary products. “The common thread among these three verticals is that they all have assets that are distributed and largely remote,” Chintakayal said.
“We use a 360-degree approach to provide a proper view of asset performance to the customer,” Chintakayal said. “To optimize capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenditures (OPEX), the industry needs data from remote equipment, driven by high energy costs in addition to the cost of manpower.”
Invendis’ IIoT system captures the cell tower site data and transmits the data to its cloud interconnect platform deployed at the network operating centre (NOC). These include power equipment parameters such as diesel generator performance, fuel consumption, rectifier performance, and energy utilization. It also captures environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity, and provides site access permissions.
The result is the ability to remotely manage assets, energy and security, enable workforce on the fly by triggering alarms as well as preventive and corrective maintenance. Analyzing this data helps operators make the most of the assets’ performance. Robust algorithms built both in the hardware, as well as in the cloud platform, help customers conserve energy by switching to the best available source for a given load and to autonomously run their operations in specific workgroups.
“The challenge of the telecom operations business is primarily to maximize uptime and network availability to meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs) committed in contractual obligations,” Chintakayal said. “To meet those SLAs, operators invest heavily in power equipment such as generators and batteries. When we talk about the scale of thousands of towers, spread across a large geography, it creates complexities that put a heavy strain on both CAPEX & OPEX.” Remote monitoring systems can help reduce an operator’s carbon footprint, as well as alert them to threats from thieves and vandals, he added.
Invendis’ solutions are easy to adapt and cover a wide array of needs for companies. It provides proprietary technology to start-up companies, or to firms that are dissatisfied with their current monitoring and automation systems. It offers solutions that are vendor agnostic, and can integrate into the customer’s current systems, thereby protecting its existing investment.
As for the future, Invendis is working on automation technology that uses artificial intelligence to self-learn and self-correct. It has recently enhanced its NOC to provide a near real-time experience for users. “It is designed to be highly intuitive, enabling enterprises to establish workgroups and share reports within these groups,” Chintakayal said. “It provides flexibility that the industry needs when it comes to data visualization on the fly.”
For more information about Invendis, please visit: https://invendis.com/.
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