Worcester Business Journal

16 Worcester Business Journal | April 16, 2018 | wbjournal.com F O C U S M A N U F A C T U R I N G PRESENTED BY Register Today! May 24, 2018 8:00AM – 1:30PM MassBay Community College 50 Oakland St., Wellesley Hills, MA 02481 $45 (includes breakfast & lunch) MassBay Community College and Towerwall, Inc. invite you to join us for our 6th Annual Information Security Summit! AFTERNOON KEYNOTE Bob Bragdon SVP/Publisher, CSO "Building a secure business: from culture to cloud" As businesses struggle to cope with the myriad cyber threats they face on a daily basis, the risk environment gets more and more complicated. While not everyone has to worry about a foreign intelligence service trying to hack them, they do need worry about meeting compliance mandates as well as partner requirements that establish baseline security standards which must be achieved. Key to success are the concepts of collaboration, resiliency, and hygiene. We'll examine how businesses, of all sizes and resource levels, can face down the threats and challenges posed by cyber risk. Attendees of this event will earn 4 CPE credits. 2018 TOPICS MAY INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO: • Develop & Maintain a Real-world Security Awareness Program • GDPR-Friendly Best Practices for IT Architects and Implementers • Incident Response Planning/Table Top Exercises • IoT Security: Challenges & Solutions • Turtles, Trust, and the Future of Cybersecurity • The Enterprise Immune System: Using Machine Learning for Next-Generation Cyber Defense For questions, contact Andrea Hamilton at 774-204-0700 or andreah@towerwall.com Pre-registration required. For event details and to register visit: www.2018itsecuritysummitma.eventbrite.com Silver Sponsors: Big Switch Networks TCG Network Services Xerox Corporation Presenting Sponsor: Platinum Sponsors: Gold Sponsors: ThinkLite lights the way – cheaper, of course Rising Star Award ThinkLite LLC, Natick Industry subsector: Energy efficiency Top executive: CEO & Founder Dinesh Wadhwani Founded: 2009 Employees: 54 Efficient beginnings: From its Babson College beginnings in 2009, ThinkLite now has a presence in 14 countries worldwide. ThinkLite has ridden the energy-efficiency movement by offering brighter lights using less electricity. D inesh Wadhwani has only been out of school for six years, but his company has already spanned the globe. In a Zuckerberg-esque story, Natick- based inkLite was founded in the Babson College dorms when CEO Wadhwani was a freshman. According to Wadhwani, the company was conceived right around 2 a.m. Wadhwani, an Indian national raised in Ghana, already had a strong back- ground in computer hardware and soware, but soon began toying around with light bulbs and LED lights. Soon, he built soware to estimate how much a home or business would save by swapping out inefficient light bulbs for LED lights. Dinesh soon realized the business would need to make its own products. Along with South Korea electronics manufacturer Samsung, inkLite de- veloped a more efficient circuit and LED light to provide 180 lumens per watt, about 30 percent more efficient than every other product on the market. Most other companies say their lights use about half the amount of energy as BY ZACHARY COMEAU Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer fluorescent bulbs, from about 32 watts to 16 watts. inkLite's bulbs, however, produce the same amount of light using about 10 watts, Wadhwani said. "at's pretty good," Wadhwani said. inkLite has landed huge projects of late, including the parking garage at the Prudential Center in Boston, and 35 stories in the Prudential Center tower. "To us, that's success – reaching out to organizations in our backyard that are sucking energy from the grid and helping them become sustainable," Wadhwani said. Another one of those backyard com- panies is Westminster-based Aubuchon Hardware, which operates more than 100 hardware stores in New England. inkLite has replaced bulbs at 41 Au- buchon locations since 2016. e bulbs and technology are saving the company about 50 percent on its electrical costs, but it's also saving on in- stallations because inkLite can retrofit its bubs into any fixture. "at's been a big win for us," said CFO Jeff Aubuchon. High-efficiency ratings are typically associated with ripping out a fixture and completely rebuilding a company's light- ing infrastructure, Wadhwani said. "ere are two things that make us successful: high-efficiency bulbs and doing that without changing fixtures," he said. W

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