664 Reduce Energy Costs with PC PowerSave

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IIT Business Podcast and we are back with another vendor spotlight for IT Nation's Pitch It Contest that is happening this year. And the company that we are talking with today is PC PowerSave. A software solution designed to reduce energy consumption and cost associated with computer systems.

And joining me to talk about that is the CEO and founder of PC PowerSave, Daniel Ellis. Daniel, how are you?

[Daniel Ellis]
Hey there, fantastic to meet you. I'm doing great. How are you doing?

[Uncle Marv]
I am doing pretty good. Pretty good. So let me first start with a little bit of a background question.

I normally don't start here, but I think it's good for people to know that you've got a pretty big interest, not just in technology, but in sustainability. So tell us about that. Absolutely.

[Daniel Ellis]
So I think it's safe to say if it involves energy or nerdiness, I'll be all over it. For many, many years, I've been interested in renewables from a technical perspective. So I like the solar and the wind tech, and I'm interested in the industrial systems that control and drive them.

But more recently, I've been helping out a hydroelectric facility down here, down south in the United Kingdom. And I'm also an advisor to an electric vehicle charging network as well. So in addition to some of the day-to-day MSP work, that is.

So I'm just interested in energy in general. I find it quite fascinating.

[Uncle Marv]
So from there, I'm going to ask, what got you started down this path of doing PC power save and targeting the MSP space?

[Daniel Ellis]
Well, like many vendors out there, I was once an MSP. And in an advisory role, I somewhat still am an MSP owner. Here in the UK, we've got a 30-man MSP, and I advise and do day-to-day duties there as well.

And some years back, when I was still on the tools, I was looking after the IT in a school. And that's what got me into the energy saving element, because I saw just how much wastage there was across the computer systems. They would just leave the computers on all day, whether there was anyone using them or not.

They'd often leave them on all night. And sometimes you'd see the caretaker, the janitor, walk in at night, hit the power switch and hear a thousand hard drives scream to a halt. But not always.

Most of the time, they just left the machines on. So me being a bit of a techie, I did the calculations. I figured out how much they were spending.

And it was a phenomenal amount just being wasted. So I back then conceived of a solution to put a halt to this, to solve it, to save them some money, knocked it together as a prototype, demonstrated it to them. They were thrilled.

The amount of money they saved was fantastic. It came off very well for us. It was a it was a 200 machine network.

And back then, the amount of power they were drawing was quite considerable. This was about 15 years ago, refurbished computer systems. And I think I think we saved them 700 to a thousand pounds per month.

And. Yeah, so over the years, I thought, you know what, I think that could be a solution that we offer to our MSP customers. So I hired a software developer and we went into business together, rewrote this system from the ground up for the modern world.

So it would be a cloud based SaaS application and re-released it about a year ago. That's how it all happened.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So obviously, the first question is, how is this type of software able to be used by us in a monetary fashion? I mean, is this something that we just simply add to our stack?

Is this something we resell to our customer? How do how do MSPs make money with this?

[Daniel Ellis]
Brilliant. Brilliant. OK, so this is a whole bunch of ways.

The simplest way is you resell it. You buy the product from us for a dollar a month per endpoint and sell it on to the customer for whatever you feel is appropriate. The advantage of the tool is once it's running, it's continually providing you a report telling you how much money it's saving the customer.

So you get to go to the QBR every month or every quarter and say, you know that software we're providing? Here's how much we've saved you. And in the vast majority of circumstances so far, it has saved more than its cost.

So an MSP can charge money for this product, make a profit, and the customer will still be better off financially. So that's one way you could do it. OK, another way you could do it, if you so wish, is just build it into your stack, swallow the cost.

And it's a brilliant differentiator for all the companies that want to say they're doing something good for the environment.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, so that's how we can sell it. How do we use it and what does it actually do?

[Daniel Ellis]
OK, yes, of course. So the software is rolled out with a single command through your RMM, just a one line PowerShell command through the RMM tool. It's deployed.

It installs on every machine. It sits down as running as a service if it's in quiet mode and if it's in a little more obvious mode, it'll sit in the system tray as well and interact with the user. And it has two modes.

The first thing it does when it's installed on your machine is the analysis mode. It will study all of the hardware that you've got. It will compare it against one of our databases, which will figure out how much power each individual component draws when it's being used heavily or when it's just idling.

We'll figure out from user activity how much time the computer sits there idle. We'll look at the event history. We'll figure out how much time over the last few years has this computer been switched on completely unused.

How much time has it spent at night switched on? Did they leave the computer on? Did they remember to shut it down when they went home, etc.?

That's the analysis mode where we figure out how much the customer's IT estate is costing them. So you as an MSP roll it out with one command, log into a web-based control panel, and there it will be your list of computer systems for each customer telling you how much power they are drawing and how much they could save if they switched on the optimize mode, which is the second function. If they switch on the optimize mode, that's when it'll start actually doing something about this.

It'll modify some very, very subtle settings, like maybe it'll adjust monitor brightness if you want it to do that. Maybe it'll limit CPU on some unimportant applications if you want it to do that. But one of the simplest functions is actually the most cost saving of all.

You know Netflix? You ever been watching Netflix late into the night where it's just suddenly pops up on the screen and says, oh you, you still, you still watching? You still awake?

And you say, yes, I am. Keep playing this TV series. So just about half an hour, 45 minutes after the end of the working day, whatever you set it to, it'll pop up on your screen and say, excuse me, are you still here?

And then a countdown begins, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour, whatever you set it to. And if the user doesn't press, yes, I'm still here, go away. It'll either shut the computer down if you want to be a little more brutal about it, or it'll hibernate it if you want to be gentle and make sure that work's all still waiting for them in the morning.

It gives the user the ability to say, don't bother me again today, come back in two hours, or yeah, shut it down now. So that's how it'll, that's one of the most powerful ways of saving energy. We've got all these clever little widgets to save energy, small chunks at a time.

But just making sure the software shuts your computer down at the end of the day is a very, very powerful cost saving, a tremendous one.

[Uncle Marv]
So now a lot of MSPs will keep everything on all night so they can run updates and scans and stuff like that. Rather than having that, you know, come up for an end user, is there a way that we can just simply schedule a shutdown each night and then start it back up in the morning before the users come in?

[Daniel Ellis]
There most certainly is. Okay. Yes.

So there's a big, big tool within it, which will say, when is a shutdown acceptable? When is it not acceptable? And we built a very deliberate feature in to say, patch Tuesday.

So when Microsoft released their updates, or when you've got a scheduled backup that you want to run, we just say, leave the machine on. And some features that are coming soon is a command line switch so that whatever backup software you're running can say to the power saving software, I'm done now. So the software can still shut it down.

If you say never shut down on a Monday night, but then your backup software executes, does its thing or your virus scan or your update, whatever it is, once it's finished, you can tell the software, I'm done, you can shut down. And on a Monday night, the computer's now off. So, yes, there's functionality to make sure that IT companies can still do all of the maintenance tools on all of the maintenance projects that we like to do.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And then all of this you can put into a nice little report to give to your customer and say, hey, we saved you this estimated amount of money.

[Daniel Ellis]
Precisely, yes, because every single time PC PowerSave executes a hibernate or a shutdown, it makes a little note in its system to say, you know, the money it saved by being off for the last 48 hours, that's because of me, that's because of PC PowerSave. And so when you load up the report, it'll say your computer systems were switched off or running in low power mode for this many hours this month because of PC PowerSave. And here is how much that saved you.

So you as an MSP at your QBR, you can deliver some actual good news.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So I imagine this is something that is great for regular desktop computers. Any particular, you know, manufacturer that's recommended or does this work across all models?

It doesn't work on Mac.

[Daniel Ellis]
OK. Other than that, you're good. Everything, everything else.

Just we haven't built a component for Mac yet.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Daniel Ellis]
But, you know, we've tried it with Dell, Lenovo, HP. Those are some of the major ones. And these, they all, they all save energy.

Now, some manufacturers are more willing to give up specifications of the hardware, which help us estimate the consumption than others. But so far, everything's been fine.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Now, is this recommended to be run on servers if people still have physical servers?

[Daniel Ellis]
We've made the decision to avoid that like the plague. OK. There are tools out there designed to optimize server efficiency, like anyone who's got a server on the Microsoft Azure platform, you know, you know, a year, sorry, a month is 730 hours, but you only need it generally on about 160, 175 hours a working month.

So there are already lots of tools out there to optimize server uptime and on time and power them back up and such. So this is just for the end user devices.

[Uncle Marv]
OK. All right. So what has been, let me first go back and ask, how long have you actually been rolling this out?

[Daniel Ellis]
Well, I'll ignore the school story from long ago, but we started redeveloping it, you know, I said that a year before, but I think it's 18 months now.

[Uncle Marv]
OK.

[Daniel Ellis]
We had it in workable prototype stage in, well, it was around. Late, late summer last year, so it's been up and running for about 11, 12 months now, and our product is never truly finished. It was in it was being tested for the first three or four months.

But since then, it's just been gradually improved every single time. We're teaching its database more and more.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, you say you're from the UK and I won't ask specifically where you are because us Americans don't really understand the geographic joys of the UK. But I want to ask, because you're there in the UK, how much of this has actually translated overseas to us here in the States?

[Daniel Ellis]
I'm so glad you ask. I have stats on that. So it's all about the price of energy.

That's what matters. Now, here in the UK, the price per energy in 2020, 2021, you're talking roughly three to five pence per kilowatt. And now the government have actually put a cap on it to stop it going up anymore.

Thirty five. So we're talking an increase of seven times from five pence to thirty five. So the price has gone up seven times.

It has also gone up in a great deal of other countries. The worst is I'll do it in cents. The worst is Ireland at 53 cents.

The UK is the third worst at 44. But the United States, the averages, they're down at 17 cents right now, which is not too bad.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to say, I expected us to be the worst.

[Daniel Ellis]
No, no. Well, you're doing you're doing pretty well for energy. I, I would say that the price hasn't quite skyrocketed yet, as I would have expected.

But a lot of it depends. For example, in Europe, we get a lot of gas power from Russia or should I say we don't at the moment. So that has had an impact in Europe.

But that's happened all over Europe. Now, in in the in the US, you've got a lot of nuclear industry, which is really, really helpful. That helps keep the costs quite low.

But the prices are I think we've had a pretty good last three or four decades of energy prices being as good as free. And I think the energy companies have started realizing they can squeeze us for a little bit more. So I've seen price increases in a lot of countries.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Now, you said that you did a lot of this in prototype mode last summer, and I imagine that you got a lot of feedback from MSPs that you either got in early on the beta testing or you allowed them to try it out. What was the feedback initially and what and how do you feel now?

[Daniel Ellis]
It's interesting. Originally, we hadn't quite got our message clear. So I found a bunch of the MSPs we were working with installing it on Azure virtual desktops, wondering why it wasn't saving energy.

And I thought, hang on a minute, that's if you save energy, you're saving Microsoft's money in their data center there. So at the start, there was some confusion, which is what we've managed to sort out with our marketing message now and the feedback with the small group of MSPs we were communicating with. It was about four or five of them.

They are once they'd gotten the hang of it, pitches started going much better with clients. And now we're at the point where it's working roughly half the time. Sorry, customers are accepting of it roughly half the time, depending on how the pitch has been put together by the MSP.

So it was it was quite it was quite an appealing, appealing thing. We are we are still accepting people to do beta testing. However, I think that window is closing fast.

We are we're pretty much ready to start commercializing this a little more in anger.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, so let me ask how it came about that you first even found out about the Pitch It Accelerator program. And then what was it that, you know, encouraged you to join?

[Daniel Ellis]
Well, that's a that's a good question. I a part of me couldn't quite remember. And my boring answer was just Jameson West told me because we're quite embedded in the community through IT Nation Evolve peer groups.

And we go to the IT Nation Connect events since I think 2019 now was the first one. And we bump into a lot of people. It popped up.

I first met Sean Lardo last year at IT Nation Secure. Sorry for that. No, it's all right.

I I'm working on it. Well, I'm getting over it. But he was no, he was he was fantastic, really.

I think it was more when I it was a grovelly approach. I gave him saying, Sean, I'm so sorry I missed the application deadline for Pitch It. Please can I be in?

And he said, sucks to be you. So I had to wait another year. Yeah, so I met Sean there.

It's just knowledge of the IT Nation community. ConnectWise has been instrumental to our MSP and it comes with the fantastic social side. And some of the vendors there recommended it.

That's it. That's how we found out about Pitch It. When I knew what it could do, I was all over it.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. All right, Daniel. Well, this all looks very interesting.

I wish you luck in Pitch It and we will see you, I'm assuming, in Orlando this November for IT Nation Connect, where hopefully you'll be one of the final, you'll be in for that pitch, getting your either the $70,000 prize, the $30,000 prize, or if you are lucky enough to get third place, the set of steak knives. Got my eye on those steak knives. All right, Daniel, thank you very much for coming on and giving us a little bit of time and look forward to seeing you down the road.

Likewise. Thank you so much for your time as well. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. There you have it, folks. Daniel Ellis, founder and CEO of PC Power Save, a great little tool that we all should use and help our clients save some money.

That's going to do it for this vendor profile for Pitch It. We'll be back with some more, as we will all summer, but head over to ITBusinessPodcast.com. Check out some of the other vendors for the Pitch It program.

Of course, all the other podcasts that we do. And that'll be it for now. We'll see you soon.

And until next time, Holla!