The State Department has awarded C3 a contract to build an analytics platform to manage energy use and sensor health in real time across 22,000 buildings in more than 190 countries.
The platform will collect and analyze hundreds of thousands of data points, using machine learning and cloud-based infrastructure, in an effort to support energy management, predict failure of equipment and monitor the health of sensors and other devices, C3 said in a statement.
Founded by Tom Siebel in 2009, C3, formerly C3 Energy, provides an application development platform and software-as-a-service apps for things like predictive maintenance, fraud detection and supply chain optimization. It started out producing technology aimed at the energy sector, but has expanded to other industries.
“We will be able to identify and address outliers across our global buildings portfolio, learn how to improve upon previous embassy designs and operations, and … lower utility and maintenance costs,” Landon Van Dyke, a State Department senior adviser for energy, environment and sustainability, said in the statement.
The C3 platform and related applications run on Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud, an isolated set of servers designed to host sensitive data or computing workloads subject to government regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP.
Cloud-based analytics is an expansion of the State Department’s existing smart meter initiative, called MeterNet. The department expects to have more than 150 of its 275 posts — which can encompass hundreds of buildings, apartments or large facilities — equipped with meters and reporting data to the C3 platform by the end of this year. It plans to have more than 200 posts equipped by 2017, and full deployment by 2020.