will benefit most from learning about how to “really know what the end user is looking for” from the experts at Google. The five-person team has mostly raised money from angel backers and by winning pitch competitions so far.
—Entrocim, the winner of the audience choice award, is a new startup based in Detroit that has created software to manage the infrastructure of data centers. Within the building housing a data center, there are more than 10 systems that need to be controlled, including HVAC, lighting, generators, electricity, water, and leak detection. Entrocim pulls the software controlling all of those different systems into a single place with an accompanying dashboard. Engineers are also able to monitor data center systems remotely. The data centers pay a recurring annual fee to use the software.
Jason Houck said he and his co-founders have lots of experience managing the infrastructure of buildings through a separate company, and customers began asking if they could develop specialized systems-monitoring software for use in data centers, too. A new company was created once Houck saw the void in the marketplace for such a product, and the moneymaking opportunity that might be at hand. After all, Houck said, there is close to $12 billion currently being spent to bring new data centers online in Michigan alone. And Entrocim also sees more opportunity in the Internet of Things industry, which is expected to have a $7.1 trillion market value in less than a decade, he added.
Entrocim would like to spend its trip to Mountain View building a relationship with Google, seeing as it operates plenty of its own data centers. Houck said in 2016, his company plans to continue to scale and hire more software developers.
