Changing the face of infrastructure management

Athenta Technologies offers products that allow customers to manage their machine networks in a real-time, convergent and integrated manner.
Gopal Joshi, Director Sales, Athenta Technologies

In a chat, Gopal Joshi, Director Sales, Athenta Technologies, discusses how smart electricity will penetrate cities in the coming years and how the company allows customers to seamlessly control various infrastructure elements through a unified framework.

What is going to be your focus in this edition of ELECRAMA?
Athenta Technologies believes that with time, a company should incorporate incremental and significant revolutionary improvements in its processes, product designs, services, and technologies. Our focus for the current edition of ELECRAMA is to educate the industry leaders that they must embrace digital technologies and come up with futuristic solutions to meet India’s growing need for sustainable power.

How do you view the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 transforming the sector?
Internet of Things began for the purpose of encouraging efficiency in the commercial sector, but now its potential for public benefit is increasingly being recognised. Smart cities are leading the way to a new set of economies around data gathering, infrastructure decision-making, and public utility technology. It is crucial for cities to have an infrastructure that supports IoT, along with custom-made software that will store and analyse numerous amounts of data collected through sensors and various devices.

Industry 4.0 is the digital transformation of industrial markets, specifically the manufacturing industry. This fourth industrial revolution is enabled by technologies that bring physical production and operations into a combined cyber-physical production environment. The new capabilities of Industry 4.0 lead to the “smart anything” phenomena which often gets the most attention — from smart grid, smart energy and smart logistics to smart facilities, including smart buildings and smart plants, and smart services to the mentioned smart manufacturing, smart factories, smart cities and so on.

What kind of opportunities do you see in smart electricity in India?
Electric power is an essential element of any city, and smart electricity plays a significant role in the manifestation of a smart city. A smart city is equipped with smart grids that ease the collection of data of every individual and transferring the data to the utility without manual intervention. The idea of a smart city was initiated by aiming elevated use of available resources such as electricity, roads, buildings, energy, and infrastructure. Smart electricity deals with an uninterrupted supply of quality power, and monitoring and recording real-time data of the energy provided to various buildings and industries.

Smart electricity will play an essential role in the future; its penetration in different cities will increase in the upcoming years. The development boards of various countries are aiming the set-up of a smart integrated infrastructure, which will be a convergence of physical infrastructure, communication, data, and analytics. These engagements will look for greater effectiveness and greater steadiness, and to give the best performance when connected with distributed generation units.

Can you brief on the latest innovations and additions for your range of solutions?
Athenta Technologies offers products that allow customers to manage their machine networks in a real-time, convergent and integrated manner. Athenta has a ubiquitous platform that straddles multiple verticals, with its current focus on Datacenter Infrastructure Management, Urban Transportation Infrastructure Management, and Smart City Integrated Command and Control. The product line covers every aspect of Infrastructure Management, starting from end equipment to network backbone and core operations. These solutions provide overall visibility of the infrastructure, from detecting problems, identification, recording trails, resolution, and comprehensive help desk assistance. Some of the products include BiTrack (Integrated Building Management System), DCeye (Datacenter Infrastructure Management System), Transdaq (Integrated Infrastructure Management System for Metro Rail), Vigilante (Integrated Infrastructure Management System for City Surveillance), AOMS (Operations and Maintenance System), FASCIA (Business Intelligent Tool), ICCC (Integrated Control and Command Centre), ERMS (Emergency Response Management System), incident management, and impact analysis.

Athenta Products are designed to manage different systems and subsystems, which communicate on different protocols through a single integrated environment. This enables the management of interoperability between all these different infrastructure elements, ensuring that they are managed and controlled in the real sense.

What are your plans and projections for the next two years?
At Athenta, our vision is to meet the changing demands, thus enabling the collection, analysis, and reporting of data in an actionable format with life cycle information on assets and resources. The company is responsible for monitoring and controlling various infrastructure elements seamlessly through a single unified framework including Servers, CCTV Surveillance, Storage, Databases, Energy, Fire, Fixed/Wireless Network and others via a single browser screen.

Athenta has been a major player in the enterprise industry over the years. The company expects to grow its position in the infrastructure management market in the wake of strong demand due to various Government initiatives such as “Make in India” and “Smart City”. When we talk about smart cities, we aim to strengthen our market footprint by providing customisable tools and solutions that can be a real game-changer with respect to an efficient ecosystem for citizen services and attractiveness of the city for new investments.