Greenwave Systems is sort of the BASF of Internet of Things: It doesn’t make the IoT products you buy, it makes them better. Greenwave (one of Network World’s recently named IoT Companies to Watch) provides software and services that help consumer-facing companies like Verizon deliver IoT features to their customers. IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant talked recently to Greenwave’s Chief Scientist, Jim Hunter, about how the company is empowering IoT applications and how new voice and social-media-driven capabilities will change the market. Hunter also explored the evolving IoT market and offered a candid assessment of how data ownership and security issues could hamper the IoT revolution.
Tell me how Greenwave got started and what you’ve set out to do for customers.
Greenwave started out in energy looking at some challenges that existed among companies that were vying for energy solutions. The CEO and one of the founders of the company is Martin Manniche. Martin was the chair of the Human Network at Cisco and the CTO of Linksys. When this all started in 2008, IoT was a very different animal than it is now and it looked like a good opportunity. Because of funding, because of a lot of the opportunity around the world with regards to energy, it looked like a great space to get into.
As the company began to grow we realized that we had a lot more expertise than just energy. We started to build a product that was a horizontal application for connectivity. I’ll tell you where that has evolved to in a second. We are today 250 employees. We are spread out around the world. We’ve got about 110 employees in Singapore, we’ve got 15 in Korea, we’ve got about 60 in Copenhagen and the rest are here in the United States with headquarters in Irvine, Calif.