NewHavenBIZ

34 n e w h a v e n B I Z | S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m some cases, before they've even emerged. His "lead from the front" style emerged early in his career, when Subbloie created a company called Information Management Associates from whole cloth. IMA was built on developing and selling call-center and data solutions for sales, marketing, telemarketing and customer-service applications. For much of the 1990s IMA was one of Connecticut's high- flyers in the surging technology marketplace, growing to $50 million in annual sales. But when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, IMA was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Al Subbloie barely skipped a beat. His next startup, founded in 2001 was Tangoe. Headquartered in Orange, Tangoe pioneered an industry known as telecommunications expense management (TEM). Subbloie took the company public, and at its high-water mark Tangoe had onboarded some $30 billion in telecommunications spending for its corporate clients — keeping a healthy chunk of that cost- reduction as its vig. And as Subbloie points out, $5 billion is just one-sixth of that. Subbloie resigned from Tangoe in May 2016, and the company was sold a year later. (Last September the Securities & Exchange Commission charged Tangoe with employing fraudulent accounting practices from 2013 to 2015. Tangoe paid $1.5 million to settle the case. Subbloie and three other company executives agreed to pay fines — $100,000 in Subbloie's case — without admitting or denying the charges.) Today, with his newest venture, Subbloie is in fact building not just a company, but trailblazing a whole new industry — once again. It's called Energy Efficiency as a Service (EEaaS — even the acronym is spelled funny), and its playing field is the $300 billion annual U.S. energy industry. With its pathbreaking business model, Budderfly assumes responsibility for all the utility spending of its corporate clients, assumes the capital risk of installing improvements to reduce its energy consumption — and then shares in the savings. It's a new business model, but Subbloie is no stranger to new business models. "e man thinks in business models," says his longtime friend and fellow Amity High School graduate Matthew Nemerson, the onetime Connecticut Technology Council president who le his position as New Haven's economic development administrator to join Subbloie as Budderfly's vice president early this year. "He instinctively can figure out who will pay for something and why." T he seed of the idea that became Budderfly extends back to Subbloie's years running Tangoe. He thought about starting an energy business then — and even bought a URL for it, called Netclimate. "e thing about energy that bothered me the most is that there's no measurement infrastructure," explains Subbloie, "other than the meter, which the utilities put there to create a bill. ey didn't put it there to measure the efficiency of what you're trying to accomplish within any [physical] facility. "And the core issue," he concluded, "is this: You can't manage what you can't measure." Subbloie has a rare gi for seeing the world through the eyes of his clients — owners of companies. "e [business owners'] No. 1 priority for energy is effective use — but the [utility/energy provider] has given you no tools for that," Subbloie explains. "Nobody has. And how can you do energy management effectively if you can't measure at the point of use?" With Budderfly, Subbloie set out to fill that measurement/ management vacuum with an array of tools. ese include proprietary hardware (e.g., plugs, switches, relays) that employ specialized soware and communicate via the Internet of ings (IoT) with a central management function. Bringing all these tools and processes to bear, Subbloie has created "the industry's first energy- management outsourcer." And Al Subbloie likes finishing first. He points around the conference room where he's chatting to light switches on the walls and AC outlets near the floor. "I used the existing holes — the [power] plugs," he explains. "We combined metering and control within these devices. So when you put that plug in the same wall it acts the same way, it's wirelessly transmitting the actual kilowatt- hour usage of whatever is plugged into that. It's an Internet of ings (IoT) device. "Same thing with a switch," he adds. "ere are meters in there that measure the kilowatt usage of [whatever] is connected to that switch." at information is then transmitted and processed using "soware in the cloud that manages all this. [Using that] we can almost remote-manage any facility to do anything. "It's what I did at Tangoe with telecom," Subbloie says. "I said to companies, 'I've got specialized soware and hardware and tools and people who can do a better job than you're doing today [managing energy expenses].'" e Budderfly business model is based on a calculation that a five- to 10-percent energy savings to the customer is a "typical landing zone" following hardware INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP Continued from Page 13 PHOTO/ANDREW VENDITTI

• Cover