ASX-listed energy management and IoT software company Simble Solutions (ASX: SIS) is making a push into the UK metering market via UK software company Utiligroup.

Simble’s energy management software will be integrated with Utiligroup’s uSmart platform and offered to power utilities that will use it to help UK residential electricity customers monitor and reduce their electricity usage.

The UK government has mandated that all electricity and gas providers roll out smart meters across all business and residential customers by 2020. Some 53 million meters will be installed in total.

Simble’s system uses sub-meters to provide more granular monitoring of electricity usage. Simble says that, in combination with Utiligroup’s uSmart DCC product, it will enable utilities to offer their customers the ability to monitor and control energy usage.

Simble CEO Fadi Geha said: “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship where we will integrate with Utiligroup’s market leading [data and communications] solution which will enable us to bring a product to market that will benefit the average UK household.

Geha told IoT Hub that as a first step Simble has signed an agreement under which it will fund Utiligroup to develop APIs and integrate Simble’s software with uSmart.

When this project is completed, expected in June, Simble will then appoint Utiligroup as a channel partner in the UK.

“What they offer is a back office business application as a service to startup and disrupter utilities,” Geha said.

“They have more than 45 utilities that are primarily disrupter utilities. They were looking for a customer engagement and energy analytics capability to enable those utilities to scale up quickly.”

Simble was founded as Acresta by Geha in 2009 as a sustainability software business and still offers a SaaS solution, CarbonView that enables companies to measure and report their carbon emissions.

It followed this with mobile app to enable companies to shift their paper based forms on to mobiles and four years ago made a move into smart metering having seen the move to mandate the rollout smart meters to ever home and business by 2020.

“I saw an opportunity in the Australian SME market to deliver a platform that would help companies understand their energy usage at a granular sub metering level and then to build an ecosystem of partners to provide value added services once people understood their energy usage,” Geha told IoT Hub.

Acresta listed on the ASX in February 2018 after acquiring an R&D company, Simble, and adopting that name.

“We identified an Australian owned R&D capability and we decided that if we kept the R&D and the management and architecture in Australia and scaled up development that would be the perfect model. So we merged the two and decided to take on the Simble name, which stands for Smart and Nimble,” Geha said.

Moving into healthcare

The Simble web site lists as one of its executives Kalana Navaratne head of strategy – utilities and healthcare. When asked about the company’s healthcare activities Geha said there were synergies between the company’s utility business and healthcare. For example, monitoring of an individual power point in an old persons’ home could be used to trigger an alarm if normal behaviour patters were not followed.

 “It is a minor area of what we do, but we have seen those synergies being exploited in the UK,” Geha said.

“In a few weeks time we will be able to talk about some announcements we plan to make. We have plans to announce a distributor in Australian and other channel partners in Australia and the UK, and we are talking to an organisation we would see a disrupter of utilities.”