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How Subeca’s Water Management Platform Goes Beyond Advanced Metering Infrastructure
The physical elements of the Subeca solution.
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echnology company Subeca offers a total water management platform for water utilities that goes beyond the capabilities of a conventional advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution. It uses meters, sensors, and valves to provide utilities and customers with intelligence about water operations and potential problems like leaks and to enable them to react remotely. Further, its customer-facing portal, Engage, not only provides information about water consumption to end users but can also be set up to enable them to control shutoff valves, monitor irrigation systems and consumption, and operate other elements of their home systems. In this interview, Chief Strategy Officer Hank McCarrick provides insight into Subeca’s solution and how it is helping utilities around the country.
from a water utility encouraging me to conserve water and to go lift the lid on my meter box and take a peek at the numbers. When I opened my meter box, I saw a bunch of spiders and thought it was a pretty poor process. I saw a need for a platform that allowed customers to understand what was going on with their water. As a process engineer, I could see that this industry was ripe for innovation. I applied a methodology similar to the one I used at the first company. I knew that this was a system approach, not a widget approach. We required sensor technologies to provide consumers the information they needed, telemetry to get the signals from the ground to wherever they needed to go, and a customer-facing presentation to make sense of it all.
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
Municipal Water Leader: How did the company develop?
24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | February 2022
Hank McCarrick: At the beginning, I didn’t think we had a prayer, going against all the big meter companies that had been entrenched for more than half a century. But it was clear to us that the end customers didn’t have the tools that they needed to do the job of managing water, so we decided to be customer focused. We provided our first platforms to companies such as Pepsi Cola; the California Department of Transportation; the University of California, Irvine, Medical Center; hotels; and homeowners’ associations, all of which are heavy water users. The initial product line was a traditional SCADA platform that was hardwired—it had to be plugged in the wall. We knew that it wasn’t an municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF SUBECA.
Hank McCarrick: My original background was in semiconductor engineering. I was on the process side of developing integrated circuits for companies like Motorola, McDonnell Douglas, and Hughes Aircraft. From there, I took my first venture into being an entrepreneur: I developed a platform that monitored the process gases used to manufacture integrated circuits. That company was pretty successful, and it was subsequently acquired. Today, Subeca is doing with water what I did with semiconductor gases many years ago. My introduction to the water utility market occurred when I was a customer. It was a simple thing: I got a notice
