01 April 2018

Matthew Riley founded Daisy Group seven years ago to target small- to medium-sized businesses which he felt were not best served by the incumbent telecoms companies.

Starting with a handful of staff, the company now has 4,000 employees and 600,000 customers of all sizes, including half of the UK’s high street retailers. And as well as telecoms, including mobile, it offers hosting, procurement – from printers to servers – and finance, among other services.

Based in Nelson, Lancashire, Daisy has 31 offices, including 14 data centres. It has recently signed a five-year deal for EkkoSense to manage the thermal performance of five of these data centres, in Aston, Farnborough, Hamilton, Romford and Wapping. And according to EkkoSense, Daisy has saved more 19 per cent in its cooling energy costs in the first few months.

EkkoSense claims to be unique in bringing together the latest wireless IoT-based sensor technology, 3D software visualisation and analytics capabilities, to create what it describes as the industry’s only monitoring solution that can track cooling in real-time.

The vendor’s service includes IoT-enabled sensors, called EkkoAir, and its EkkoSoft Critical 3.2SaaS-enabled software for “room building” capabilities.

According to EkkoSense, when combined with EkkoSoft thermal modelling, monitoring and visualisation software, EkkoAirprovides data centre operators with an “intuitive, holistic 3D real-time view of cooling performance across their entire data centre estate”.

It reckons this enables them to reduce thermal risk and save between 20 and 30 per cent of their overall data centre cooling costs.