It's been a good year for On-Ramp Wireless. The San Diego-based developer of smart grid wireless monitoring and networking technology was among the winners in this year's GE Ecomagination Challenge, and last week On-Ramp president and CEO Joaquin Silva was named one of the 15 most influential energy executives by FierceEnergy.

Recently, On-Ramp Wireless announced a partnership with Fountain Springs and Korea Telecom to deploy its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system as part of the country's Jeju Smart Grid Test-Bed project, considered one of the largest smart grid projects in the world. On-Ramp's metering and sensing technology will help connect up to 6,000 homes with schools, wind turbines, transmission lines, energy storage systems, and plug-in vehicles.

In an interview, CEO Joaquin Silva discusses the company's technology and business model, the siloed nature of utilities, and future opportunities for VERGE technologies in commercial building automation and logistics.

GreenBiz: Can you provide a short overview of On-Ramp Wireless?

Joaquin Silva: We started the company almost four years ago now, and developed a wireless system from the ground up for sensing and metering applications. We've applied that technology to utility automation and industrial automation, where metering and sensing are required.

Our technology has the ability to cover very large geographic areas with minimal infrastructure and deliver a two-way reliable wireless system in free spectrum for those types of applications.

GB: Can you describe On-Ramp's value proposition? How do you stand out among competitors?

JS: Our core technology gives us range, capacity, robustness, security, but also a unique business model. If you look at the smart meter AMI space, most companies try to develop and control the end-to-end AMI system, including the metering, metered data management, and cost system.

Some specialty suppliers -- like Trilliant or Silver Spring Networks, which do end-to-end system management -- sell directly to the utility to control the whole value chain out of necessity. Our business model is to work with our end customers to promote our technology and network to deliver the end-to-end solution. The technology gets embedded into the metering suppliers and sensor automation vendors and the network can be provided either from a systems integrator or a value-added manufacturer.

We can do this because we can fundamentally change the cost equation to deliver these types of applications and open up profitability for the entire value chain which is struggling to deliver ROI and turn profits.

While we have a proprietary technology at the base core, one clarification is that pretty much all AMI technologies are proprietary on some level; there is no common interoperability certification process. There is no complete standards-based AMI end-to-end system in the market today that is viable.

GB: What opportunities do you see working with utilities, either here or abroad?

JS: We're really in the early days of utilities transforming their business with IT and wireless communications. There's been discussion of smart grid and various pockets of automation have occurred over the last 10 years or so.

But it's early in terms of transforming business processes and tying together organizational silos. If you look at a utility, they’ve got the IT organization, transmission distribution, metering, billing and so forth.