Insight Platform™ Unleashes Global Collaboration for Renewable Energy Information Systems

San Jose, Calif. – July 16, 2008 – Fat Spaniel Technologies, the market leader in monitoring and reporting services for distributed energy systems, today announced the release of Fat Spaniel Insight Platform™, the world’s first open intelligence platform for building, sharing and running energy data applications. Insight Platform provides an open information architecture that enables application developers, system integrators, equipment manufacturers and others in the renewable energy industry to extend their existing monitoring resources and develop new service capabilities.

“Insight Platform opens up Fat Spaniel’s market-leading technology to help our partners, customers and the developer community extend in-house monitoring systems, explore entirely new energy management capabilities, and create open integration across multiple vendors, hardware types, and distributed locations,” said Chris Beekhuis, president and CTO of Fat Spaniel. “As the industry continues to expand, we hear an increasing need for standardized, powerful management capabilities that bring the power of information technology to the renewable energy business. We are proud to be providing a single platform for unleashing innovation and streamlining operations in this high-growth industry.”

Capabilities:
Fat Spaniel’s Insight Platform supports the largest number of renewable energy devices in the industry – more than 125 different device types – to deliver critical real-time and historical information about photovoltaic, solar water heating, and wind energy system performance. Through Insight Platform, energy application developers can build full-featured clean energy and environmental web applications without having to deal with the headaches of building and maintaining an expensive service infrastructure. Providing a universal platform for high quality renewable energy data collection, exchange and visualization, Insight Platform’s open architecture will enable applications such as:

• Monitored Device Integration: Capture events and status data from monitored devices in solar electric systems such as inverters, trackers and environmental sensors, which can export data to a standard Insight Platform data interface while still leveraging their own built-in sensors, data loggers and communications equipment.
• Platform Back-end Support: Use Fat Spaniel’s data infrastructure to power proprietary third-party energy applications, with user views that can be branded according to that third party’s requirements.
• Customer Support: Use a critical inverter fault event captured from a monitored solar electric system to automatically create a customer support case record in a help desk application.
• Widgets and Mash-ups: Easily embed Fat Spaniel web objects – including widgets such as charts or tables – in third-party web sites to create custom views using dynamic Web 2.0 mechanisms.
• Billing: Use data retrieved from Fat Spaniel’s data warehouse using a standard “Get Monitored Information” data interface to generate customer invoices based on energy usage.

Insight Platform Developer Program:
Fat Spaniel has worked extensively with a variety of partners in order to refine the Insight Platform technology and create the foundations of the Insight Platform Developer Program. Current Insight Platform development program participants include such companies as:
Advanced Energy www.aei.com/
Campbell Scientific www.campbellscientific.com
CH2M HILL www.ch2m.com
Echelon www.echelon.com
Inovateus Development www.inovateus.com
PV Powered www.pvpowered.com
Solectria www.solren.com

In a related announcement today, Fat Spaniel announced an integrated monitoring solution in partnership with PV Powered. Fat Spaniel expects to announce relationships with a variety of additional partners in the coming months as their solutions are brought to market.

Platform Architecture:
Insight Platform’s Application Programming Interface (API) enables interaction with Fat Spaniel’s Web services which operate in a hosted, multi-tenant environment that allows shared use of a highly scalable, robust and secure back-end infrastructure. This infrastructure is hosted in a SAS-70 Type II certified data center, which processes millions of transactions daily. The developer-friendly platform is compatible with any programming language that can access a Web service and is implemented using industry standards such as SOAP, XML, WSDL and HTTP.

Availability:
Insight Platform is available to partners and developers today. To obtain a copy of the “Insight Platform Developer Guide” and for further information about Insight Platform, contact [email protected].

About Fat Spaniel Technologies
Based in San Jose, Calif., Fat Spaniel Technologies, Inc. is the leading provider of monitoring and reporting services for distributed, renewable energy systems – enabling efficient operations and maintenance, compelling web-based visualization, and accurate reporting. Fat Spaniel’s services are based on Insight Platform, the industry’s first open platform for multi-vendor system and portfolio monitoring. Users of Fat Spaniel’s services include system owners, system integrators, PPA service providers, utilities, inverter manufacturers, project financing firms, REC traders and regulatory agencies. The company specializes in renewable energy systems including solar electric, solar water heating and small wind. Fat Spaniel products are presently deployed in over 1,500 locations in 13 countries worldwide. Fat Spaniel is funded by Chrysalix Energy, Element Partners, Ignition Partners, PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund and Applied Ventures, LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, Inc. For more information, see http://www.fatspaniel.com.
 

Media contact:
Rosalind Jackson, Antenna Group for Fat Spaniel Technologies
[email protected], 415-977-1923