This post was originally published on Tendril’s website. Tendril is now Uplight.

Today is an exciting one at Tendril! We’re delighted to announce that Navigant Research has selected us as a Leader in their 2018 Home Energy Management (HEM) Leaderboard. We are beyond proud of this accomplishment. It represents a jump of 7 spots from the 2015 report where we were positioned as a Challenger. That’s a lot of movement in just three years. The only other Leader is a billion dollar company that has been serving the utility industry for decades. To be regarded as a Leader in our space alongside such a massive tech giant reaffirms our dedication to remaining an independent, nimble and cutting-edge technology company.

Our innovations in technology and vision for the future of HEM have ranked second to none. With accolades like that I like our chances of making more strides the next time Navigant publishes this report.

In the meantime, here are the 2018 rankings:

So how did we ascend from Challenger to Leader in just three years? It’s all about that vision and technology innovation Navigant gave us such high marks for.

Vision – Our vision for the HEM market is founded in 15 years of experience helping our utility partners engage with their customers. The market has come a long way from the days of In-Home Displays and residential gateways. Here are a couple of primary trends impacting the HEM market over the next several years:

• HEM will become part of an integrated customer journey – HEM has traditionally been defined by point solutions that don’t work together for the benefit of the customer. We believe that in order to be truly effective, HEM technologies need to work in tandem and learn from outcomes to further individualize the customer experience. At a top line, communications, offers and rebates need to be tailored to the individual and their dwelling. At the product level, HERs should be used to promote demand response (DR) programs, marketplaces need to offer dynamic rebates and smart thermostats need to be optimized for increased savings (to name just a few examples). This functionality is enabled by a common data layer that utilities will more aggressively adopt in the form of DSM analytics software platforms.
• If HEM isn’t networked, it isn’t optimized – HEM devices, to be truly effective, need to be networked. Our software dynamically controls thermostats to save money without impacting customer comfort and also offers customers the chance to easily opt in to different rate structures. Utilities are showing a lot of interest in this functionality and we think they will continue to want this level of integration. So while keeping them separate for the next couple of years may make sense, over time they will converge, especially as more DERs come on the grid.

Technology Innovations – We’re currently engaged in various research and development projects to help our utility partners modernize DSM. For instance, we’ve started including contextual product and service advertisements in our Home Energy Reports (HERs). This effort improves the cost recovery of BEE programs and solidifies the utility’s role as a trusted energy advisor. We are also ingesting AMI data to make our alerts even more accurate, and have developed an integration with smart speakers so consumers can ask energy related questions of their utility. This functionality allows customers to check the status of their bill, ask for tips on reducing consumption and be notified when their bill is trending higher than normal. With Orchestrated Energy, we are adding support for more smart devices coming on the grid, including solar, storage and electric vehicles.

Our distinguished solutions continue to deliver great results at scale. We run the world’s largest HER program on behalf of Duke Energy and have sent 100 million HERs that helped 3.1 million customers save more than 2.7 terawatt hours of electricity in total. We also achieved some fantastic results from our Summer 2017 Orchestrated Energy rollouts. We delivered 80%+ cooling load shift and doubled the energy efficiency of smart thermostats, resulting in an impressive 2 kW of demand shift per event, all without impacting customer comfort. We’ve also seen increased use of our High Bill Alerts, Energy Assessments, Engagement Portal and other related solutions.

It’s a very exciting time to be serving the HEM market and Navigant’s recognition of Tendril as a Leader really validates our approach. It’s full of great insights on the market, including drivers and barriers, company profiles, and growth projections. And if you would like to speak with us about how we can put our leading solutions to work for you, we’d be happy to schedule some time.