If your mission is to help businesses improve the performance and reliability of electronic assets by providing intelligent technology to ensure those assets work better, longer, and more profitably, it helps to have a strong technology background. That’s where Innovolt comes in.
Founded in 2007 by some of the most knowledgeable minds in grid and power protection, the company has rapidly grown its offerings and today has a substantial portfolio of intellectual property and patents related to its expertise in ensuring the performance of electronic assets. These unique, adaptable microprocessor-based algorithms, originally perfected at the laboratories of the Georgia Institute of Technology (more commonly known as Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, deliver unmatched capabilities that enable unprecedented control of electronics.
The Innovolt Difference
When it comes to power protection there’s surge protection, there are uninterruptible power supplies, and everything else. Innovolt offers that everything else.
Brady Murray
“It’s easy for us to get lumped into the same category as surge protectors and power supplies,” explains Brady Murray, SVP Marketing and Business Development. “We’re a great surge protector, but surges are a small percentage of power disturbances. If you look at studies about power problems, a surge is only a problem about a half a percent of the time. The vast majority of voltage problems are voltage sags caused by minor dips in power.”
The best way to think about this he says is when an air conditioner in a home, for example, clicks on and the lights dim momentarily. “Those minor voltage sags and the current inrushes that follow them are very harmful to complex electronics like today’s MFPs and that’s the problem that we help protect you from,” says Murray.
Innovolt’s Intelligent Electronics Management (IEM) platform maximizes the performance of electronic assets across the distributed enterprise. Through the combination of its patented sensor technology and the Innovolt Management Cloud, Innovolt helps resellers and their customers protect expensive, sensitive equipment while providing resellers with the tools to predict, measure, and optimize essential assets in dispersed environments.
Using a series of patented protection protocols and remediation algorithms to recognize potential power concerns and fix the issues before damaging effects occur, Innovolt focuses on three core competencies—monitoring, remediation, and management—to improve reliability and reduce the cost of electronics ownership, including:
Innovolt Management Cloud screen shot
Electronics Management Platform
Innovolt’s comprehensive electronics management platform combines sensor technology with analytics software to optimize the performance, productivity and useable life of essential electronics. Through the remediation of power disturbances and a cloud-based dashboard and management console, customers achieve improved equipment uptime, lower repair costs, and increased revenue.
In addition to safeguarding and optimizing the performance of electronic assets, Innovolt monitors and aggregates key data from those assets and turns it into actionable information via the Innovolt Management Cloud (IMC). The reseller simply signs on to Innovolt’s secure, intuitive Web-based dashboard and console to remotely track and manage vital electronics.
Innovolt-as-a-Service
The latest way that Innovolt is taking its products to market is the Innovolt-as-a-Service model. Murray believes it’s a great way for dealers to get started offering Innovolt to their customers.
When one considers the up-front cost of an Innovolt device versus a surge protector, Murray acknowledges that Innovolt can be more expensive in some cases. This can be an obstacle for dealers and resellers of the technology despite the added capabilities Innovolt provides over a traditional surge protector. That’s the reason, he says, for the evolution to a service model. Now, instead of the dealer or customer purchasing the equipment up front, Innovolt will sell the customer the protection service for a small monthly fee.
“You don’t have to take that big chunk of capital expenditure, instead you pay as you go and for as many new devices as you want,” notes Murray.
This model offers an array of advantages, including protection from product obsolescence. A customer who buys a device will have to buy a new one whenever a new device comes out with new features and functionality. Under the service model, they can be continually upgraded to the latest equipment at no additional cost.
“You’ve transferred from this big up front capital expenditure to a much smaller operating expense,” says Murray.
This model also provides customers with ongoing information.
“In addition to our core protection, we also provide a Web-based dashboard that shows you all the power events taking place that we’re protecting you from,” says Murray. “That can provide important intelligence to folks as they make decisions about service costs or if [issues are being caused by] internal wiring issues within the building.”
That’s key, says Murray, citing research that reveals that around 80 percent of all power problems originate within the building rather than outside.
“If you have some sort of wiring issue internal to your building or office and that’s causing problems for your electronic equipment, Innovolt can show you that and allow you to be intelligent and fix those things. Without our visibility you’d never know.”
This is still a relatively new offering from Innovolt, but the early returns from resellers and customers is positive. “Dealers are excited about it because it’s an ongoing revenue stream instead of just a one-time sale,” states Murray.
Power Protection and MFPs
Why should dealers and resellers care about power protection? That’s a loaded question for Murray who hones in on the benefits of protecting MFPs from power anomalies that can take place in an office.
“When a sag takes place you have an experience like kinking a garden hose—you bend the hose and the water slows to a trickle, you un-kink it and straighten it out you see that rush, the water rushing out of the hose,” explains Murray. “The same things happen to electronics when there’s a voltage sag. There’s a dip followed by an inrush of power that damages electronic components, particularly on high end MFPs, which are really made up of a collection of integrated systems working together in concert rather than an individual machine.”
That makes sense when one considers that an MFP consists of various parts, all running independently, yet all working in sync, from paper manipulation, to scanning, to touch screens. When things are out of sync there’s the potential of error codes, resulting in machines that are offline. Over time power issues will cause the device to fail more quickly, says Murray.
“Without protection from these power disturbances, you’ll see more error codes than you normally would and experience more downtime.”
Creating Awareness
Educating the dealer and reseller community about the Innovolt difference poses a sizable, but not insurmountable challenge for Innovolt. As a result, Murray is on a mission to make sure everyone understands Innovolt’s value in terms of protecting electronic equipment from downtime and service calls caused by power disturbances.
“Education is our biggest challenge because this is a problem that manifests itself slowly,” states Murray. “It’s not like if you don’t protect your devices they’re going to break tomorrow. If they take the time to understand what we do and how we’re different from a surge protector, we win. If they don’t have the time or interest to understand the difference between Innovolt and a surge protector and they choose the least expensive option, then we don’t win. The burden for us isn’t winning on a technological basis, we always do that, it’s making sure people understand how we’re different and what we do.”
Innovolt has over a quarter million devices deployed and has witnessed plenty of side-by-side comparisons between protected and unprotected devices.
“Usually there’s a reduction of 40-60 percent in service calls and downtime as a result of Innovolt,” reports Murray. “We know it, the numbers are there. When you look at the small amount you pay for Innovolt versus the huge savings you get, the numbers work out great.”
Murray says the best way to present power protection to one’s customer base is to bundle it in with the MFP sale, although it can be done separately too. “A major global OEM includes it with every MFP that goes out the door. We have other clients who do it through their service channel. When they have a machine that’s having issues, they’ll come in, recognize here’s a situation that Innovolt can help with and install it that way. We’re happy to go to market either way.”
A Growing Business
Last year was a good one for Innovolt, particularly in the office technology space. Expect to see the company continue to build on those successes while expanding into new markets this year.
“We’re starting to see some other markets with similar dynamics to the office equipment space that are different and new to us, like the ATM market,” reveals Murray. “ATMs are actually very similar to MFPs. There’s a lot of the same things going on—internal paper handling, monitors, touch screens, scanning. For that reason our technology is a good fit. Markets like that are early for us, but it’s exciting to see the opportunity.”
Does he still see room for growth in the dealer channel? “Our penetration is good, but there’s certainly plenty of room to grow,” acknowledges Murray. “We’re excited as more people become aware of what we do and how we’re different, there’s a lot of potential for expansion.”
It’s been seven years since Innovolt first opened its doors and Murray finds the biggest difference between Innovolt today and 2007 is the transformation of its business model, as it transitions into Innovolt-as-a-Service along with all the data that customers can now access.
“It’s this increased availability and awareness of data we’re now getting that is most exciting,” says Murray. “In the past, the core protection was always there. We continue to do that and continue to do that very well. We’ve got patents on that technology and are the only one that protects from all these different anomalies like sags and brownouts and minor over-voltages, whereas everyone else is just a surge protector. The other thing we’re doing now is collecting all this data from every device in the field. It automatically uploads to the Internet and provides our customers with much more information about their environment and provides us with more information about what’s going on.”
That, he feels, is the biggest difference. “We always knew our technology worked, our customers knew it worked, but you could never see it and now you can and that’s exciting.”
Why Innovolt? Why Not?
Murray concludes with a final compelling argument to convince resellers who aren’t doing business with Innovolt to give them another look.
“It’s an interesting technology for someone interested in increasing uptime, decreasing service calls, and thereby increasing customer satisfaction,” he says. “In this business we all know the one-time sale is important, but keeping the customer happy and building a relationship with them over time is the real key. That’s where we can really help people excel because machines protected by Innovolt go down less, have fewer error codes, and produce more copies between service calls. All of those are nice metrics, and if dealers want to find a way to get ahead of their competitors we can be a real difference maker.”
Contact Information
Innovolt
14 Piedmont Center
3535 Piedmont Road NE, Suite 1205
Atlanta, GA 30305
www.innovolt.com
Sales: (404) 467-6331
Support: (404) 467-6355
Benefits of Innovolt-as-a-Service:
- Innovolt’s patented and proven solution with minimal upfront investment and quick ROI
- Move away from Capital Expenditure to an Operating Expenditure better reflecting immediate and adjusting needs of your business
- Continual access to the most current electronics protection technology
- Access to the Innovolt Management Cloud including reports tracking your electronic assets and disturbances protected against
- An enhanced support portal customized just for you
- Access to training through videos and webinars
- Simplified upgrade path to gain access to latest product releases
- Assigned Customer Success Manager
- 24×7 Support
