A MESSAGE FROM

THE FOUNDER

Dear Customer:

I thought it would be interesting to share my journey with you. I truly look forward to getting to know your journey as well..

All my life it seems, I am surrounded by a lot of love. I studied engineering prior to joining an IT company where my ride started with reading TCP/IP by Douglas Comer, cover to cover, leading to testing of the OSI stack on Lucent routers. I fell in love with routing, with IP addressing and so much more... I did that for a little while before moving to Miami with my hero.

I remember to this day, picking up the yellow pages and calling companies with a request for an opportunity to learn even if they could not pay me. A small ISP, satellite provider took me on and gave me a chance and the rest is history. It was here that I saw the world of internet routing, BGP, Voice over IP and, boy did it facinate me. The door to Voice over IP meant working with cisco gateways, complex signalling in legacy PTT systems in many parts of the world and I loved it all. From here, life brought me to a niche Satellite Service provider that serviced cruise ships, oil rigs and more that were mobile and needed internet and voice services. At this company, as we ran the engineering department together, I met some great people including my partner, a man so remarkable, and so fair that he was almost unfair to himself, with whom I had the privilege of building my company.

I had been in this country a couple of years. Down the in the engineering lab, where we tested network solutions, I mentioned this dream of creating a VOIP company to my partner who was European. It was with our spouses that we took off on this dream even though we had very little money.

I have felt in life that I did not get so far in my dreams as my reality took me... A journey filled with great joy and learning... A journey that leaves me humbled everyday about how much good and warmth came my way...

ROOPA PREMKUMAR

I look forward to working with you, learning from you, empowering you, your people and your initiatives to many great successes as the Energy industry looks to evolve to the Utility and grid of the future.

We bought some cheap voip gateways, installed them in Europe in my partner’s home with some copper phone lines, my hero setup a billing server and some homegrown billing software off a desktop and cable modem and off I went selling our VOIP service provider route to a huge Telecommunications company.

I remember sitting in the parking lot during lunch, just incessently calling the carrier to do business with us. From here, against all odds, we built a multi-million dollar company, that became one of the largest voip providers in the world to our destination, of incredible quality, built two fully licenced phone companies that interconected to the PTT in Europe, built systems to support it, we had customers calling all over the world through our network and had the time of our life. I did the sales, engineering, monitoring, finance with my partners and enjoyed every minute of it. We promised ourselves that we would stay true to our roots and always live a simple life! This was a ride of a lifetime that took me farther than my wildest dreams..

After twelve years of running our company, it was time for a change. We moved to Arizona and I ran into a Utility here. It was here that I fell in love with Energy, this company, its people and its purpose. Power is one of the things that humanity takes for granted, is at the very foundation of our existance, but is so incredibly complex to keep reliable and safe. I led many efforts in the space of Cyber Security and IT before irrevocably falling in love with the Energy Management system, its complexity, its criticality, its people and the control centers that relied on it. I led Real-time Transmission Operations for EMS for many years, with a deep customer focus, with a deep commitment, with a deep respect for the sanctity of it, with discipline, rigor and a tenacity, to make this space better, innovating for the operators, the support team and the Vendors. I was privileged to run into people with tremendous knowledge of the grid and the systems that support it who were willing to help me learn from them.

With relentless hard work, we built a great real-time team, one that had tremendous customer focus, and lived continuous learning every day, elevated service for operations, brought together numerous support teams to embrace best practices for operational excellence and built lasting relationships with Transmission and Distributions groups as well as the Vendors.

While running real-time operations, I led the upgrade effort for the legacy Energy Management system that was struggling for many years, with efforts that documented many thousand requirements spread across tens of teams to replace a legacy energy management system, ran gap analysis and mitigation with numerous stakeholders to ensure that the Vendor is able to understand what the teams needed as a business to succeed, laid the foundation for success with renewables with the team and charted a great path forward.