#VCOM history: Enthusiasm outweighs Efficiency

It has been more than 20 years since meteocontrol started developing tools for "remote monitoring". 

What did this mean in practice?  

Monitoring with a printer. Manual meter readings. Long trips on the road. 

No business to make money with. No scalable business case at all. So - what next? 

It was the time when people were not 100 % sure if the internet will really make it. For inventing remote monitoring solutions it was the perfect match. 

Some of you may still remember our first professional platform for monitoring PV plants centrally: safer'Sun Professional. A platform which was already using satellite data and simulations to detect plant failures. 

You can't imagine the challenges we were facing at that time. Data transmission once a day. If the transmission failed: Wait & Pray. Data formats were far away from standard.

Nevertheless, safer'Sun Professional was becoming the worlds leading independent solution for professional PV monitoring. Our partners were happy with a simple interface, the reliable and stable availability and the structure that was perfect for plants up to 1 MW. In simple words: It was the right product at the right time. 

Within a few years the market and the requirements were changing rapidly. Our partners and their portfolios were growing from a few plants to hundreds of sites all over the globe and sizes of projects we never really dreamt of. 

Time for a change. Portfolios had to be managed more effectively. The data had to be available in real time. The solution had to be flexible for interfacing with third party dataloggers and the IT infrastructure of large O&M teams. The feature set had to cover the complete workflow of an O&M operator, not only the analysis part. 

Time for the #VCOM. 

In the coming weeks we will dive deeper into the tool and it's features. I am looking forward to seeing you again next week Wednesday.

Coming soon: What to do while enjoying your first cup of coffee in the morning?