Rackspace Technology^® (NASDAQ: RXT), a leading end-to-end, multi-cloud technology solutions company, today announced working with Delta Thermal to protect and grow the power grid enabled by Delta Thermal to help electric utilities and downstream industrial customers predict and prevent costly outages, save millions of dollars, and generate 20x ROI.

Based in Tucson, AZ, Delta Thermal provides utility and mining customers with a hardware and software solution that continuously monitors equipment temperatures to prevent failures and downtime.

Delta Thermal’s ThermalSafe software is used by power companies that generate, transmit and distribute electricity for sale to customers. This automated monitoring solution is relied on by a wide range of energy providers, including federal power programs, cooperatives, industrial electricity customers, public power utilities, independent power producers and investor-owned utilities.

Company history

Since the company’s inception in 2017, Delta Thermal followed a traditional server-oriented IT model, but as the company quickly grew, the company realized that it needed the ability to scale. After careful consideration, Delta Thermal chose Onica by Rackspace Technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its market position, the cost-savings it could bring and its ability to scale to support his company’s growth.

“The cost savings are important, but the big payoff is competitive advantage. The fact that I don’t have servers anywhere means my customers will never pay for more resources than they use,” said Andy Griffis, CEO, Delta Thermal, Inc.: “We chose Rackspace Technology because of its unbounded capacity to scale, the fact that it lets us make the maximum use of human capital, wherever it’s available and its significant return on capital.”

Rackspace Technology worked with Delta Thermal to provide prototypes of two sensing solutions. The project needed to be completed on a short, four-week timeline, and required the creation of two algorithms — one for sensors that detect temperature anomalies, and one for sensors used to forecast and predict failures.

“We collaborated with Delta Thermal to devise a solution where measurements were stored on AWS DynamoDB,” said Jeff DeVerter, Chief Technology Evangelist at Rackspace Technology: “Using Python script on Amazon SageMaker, data was then analyzed and transformed to use for both anomaly detection and time series forecasting. The solution also employed machine learning domains that included existing, ready-to-use AWS-optimized ML workflows to detect anomalies and predict temperatures.”

In one case, a customer was able to detect a problem and send out a maintenance crew within 40 minutes of installing Delta Thermal’s ThermalSafe software. In another instance, a Delta Thermal client was able to find an anomaly and fix it approximately six months before it would have caused a catastrophic failure, saving several hundred thousand dollars in potential repair costs.