This project holds a particular significance for me — not because it succeeded commercially, but because of what it got right technically, and what it took the rest of the industry another fifteen years to catch up on.
In 2003, after leaving UBS Warburg in London, I returned to the North West and founded Trinity Logic Ltd. One of the first major ventures was a partnership with two other companies to develop what was, at the time, a genuinely novel concept: an automated smart metering system designed for large public sector installations — hospitals, schools, and government buildings — capable of collecting granular energy usage data remotely and presenting it through a web-based interface that different user groups could interact with and report from.
This was 2003. The national smart meter rollout wouldn’t begin in earnest for another decade. What we were building was, in the truest sense, ahead of its time.
What We Built
My contribution to the partnership was the aggregation and reporting platform — the server-side system that received metering data transmitted from remote meters over the 3G mobile network, processed and stored it, and surfaced it through a role-based web interface.
The platform handled several distinct concerns:
Remote data ingestion — meters in the field transmitted usage readings over the GPRS/3G mobile network at regular intervals. The aggregation layer received, validated, and persisted this data reliably, handling connection loss, retransmission, and the realities of early mobile data infrastructure where connectivity was far from guaranteed.
Data aggregation and normalisation — raw meter readings from heterogeneous devices needed to be normalised into a consistent data model before any meaningful reporting could be produced. The platform handled unit conversion, gap detection, and anomaly flagging as part of the ingestion pipeline.
Role-based web interface — different user groups had different needs. Facilities managers needed operational dashboards. Finance teams needed cost and consumption reports. Maintenance teams needed alerts and device status. The web interface was built to support distinct views and permissions for each group, all drawing from the same underlying data.
Reporting and trend analysis — usage patterns, peak demand periods, comparative reporting across sites and time periods. The goal was to give public sector organisations the data they needed to identify waste, optimise consumption, and make informed capital investment decisions.
Technology
Building this in 2003 meant working with the tools and infrastructure of the time. The server-side platform was built in Java using the Apache Struts MVC framework, with MySQL for persistence and Apache Tomcat as the web server. Communication with remote metering hardware used XML over GPRS/3G — at a time when mobile data was expensive, unreliable, and far from ubiquitous in industrial applications.
There was no Maven, no Spring framework as we know it today, no cloud infrastructure to fall back on. Everything had to be built and operated directly.
Outcome and Legacy
We launched a working prototype in 2004. The technology performed as designed — data was flowing from remote meters, the platform was aggregating and presenting it correctly, and the user interface was functional across the intended user groups. The prototype validated the core thesis: that large public sector sites could be instrumented, monitored, and optimised remotely using mobile data infrastructure.
The project ultimately ended not because of technical failure but because of diverging views between the partners on the direction the product should take. It was a formative lesson in the difference between building good technology and building a sustainable business around it.
What struck me years later, when I joined ESG Global in 2020 to work on their smart metering infrastructure, was how closely the problems we had solved in 2003 mirrored the architecture that underpinned the national rollout. Remote data collection over mobile networks, aggregation pipelines, role-based reporting interfaces for different stakeholder groups — the fundamental design was sound. The industry had arrived at the same answers, with better hardware, better connectivity, and better commercial conditions. The engineering instincts were right; the timing and the partnership were the variables we couldn’t control.
Every major UK energy supplier now provides smart metering as standard. What we were prototyping in a converted office in Lancashire in 2003 is now installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses. That’s not a bad thing to have been first at.
Smart Meters — GOV.UK
ESG Global
Trinity Logic Ltd