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Patrick Cooke, director of marketing for Trihedral, sat down with Water Online Radio for this live interview from the show floor at WEFTEC 2011 in Los Angeles. Cooke discusses the capabilities, value, and importance of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) for water/wastewater treatment facilities. Listen or read on to learn more.

Todd Schnick: We are back, broadcasting live from the Los Angeles Convention Center and the tradeshow floor of WEFTEC. I am Todd Schnick, joined by my co-host, Todd Youngblood. Todd, this next guest is going to be trouble, I think.

Todd Youngblood: Well, I think so too, and I'm also wondering if we have any guests lined up today that are not named Patrick.

Todd Schnick: So far it's been the Patrick and Todd and Todd show so...

Todd Youngblood: We're three for three.

Todd Schnick: All right. Well, continuing with business this first hour, I'm really happy to welcome the director of marketing of Trihedral. Welcome to Water Online Radio, Patrick Cooke.

Patrick Cooke: Thank you, Todd and Todd.

Todd Schnick: Well, it's great to have you. Before we get into our conversation, take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about yourself and about Trihedral.

Patrick Cooke: Sure. One of the good things is that although it's early in Los Angeles, it's late back home. It's after lunch, so I'm hopefully going to be mentally awake.

We're a small – relatively small – company based in Bedford, Nova Scotia. We have 50 employees in our offices in Bedford, Scotland, and offices in the U.S. And we specialize in the production of SCADA software or, for our guys in Scotland, they call it SCADA (alternate pronunciation) software.

Todd Youngblood: It doesn't matter how you pronounce it, I'm still not sure I know what that is.

Patrick Cooke: Well I've been doing it for 20 years and I'm still not sure either. But, theoretically, it's supervisory control and data acquisition.

Typically in the water and wastewater business there are lift stations, pumping stations, booster stations, and there is hardware at those stations which provide localized control and, somewhere off in la-la land, somewhere sits an operator who's looking at what's going on in the system and can make intelligent decisions based on what he's seeing at different locations.

Todd Schnick: Well, how long has Trihedral been in this business?

Patrick Cooke: We're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year. We had a wonderful corporate-wide party back in Nova Scotia about a week and a half ago and brought our people in from all parts of the world, had a brainstorming session, and I think it has equipped us really, really well for the next 25 years.

Todd Youngblood: Patrick, I want to take you back to the definition. I actually have heard of SCADA before, but I always associate it with the industrial sector – with factories, with people that are building things. I mean, what's the difference?

Patrick Cooke: That's a very valid question. SCADA is an incredibly wide and broad scope of activity. In the manufacturing plant it would be presenting to the operator what's going on on the manufacturing floor, give him an opportunity to respond, to make changes to methods of production.

It is used in the water and wastewater business, obviously, for talking about their statuses of lift stations or pumping stations, if there is much sewerage that's collecting, if it's going into the sewerage plant, if the water that's going out into the water system is clean.

SCADA is also used in (and we have some of the largest SCADA systems in North America) … we're monitoring radar equipment, for example, across Canada – some 250,000 tags. We're monitoring the status of broadcasting systems in the United Kingdom and in Canada, Malaysia, and other parts of the world. It is virtually everywhere, although nobody hears about it and nobody sees it.

Todd Schnick: How do you translate that into dollars and cents? I mean, if somebody's going to make an investment in that kind of technology, how do you justify it?

Patrick Cooke: The investment really doesn't have to be that large, and typically you're bringing back information. I'll give you an example: we do the monitoring of cryogenic tanks for a variety of customers. They want to make sure that the truck that's going out to deliver gases – delivering gas, in a proper sense …the truck is worth a million dollars. The content on that truck is worth a million dollars, and what you want to do is you only want to go and deliver to the tanks that absolutely need product. When you can take a $2 million asset to make sure that it's employed more logically and reasonably, it becomes a very modest investment to put in a SCADA system that gives you that kind of information.

Also, what is the cost of not knowing if you have a sewerage overflow? Or the cost of not knowing whether you're actually broadcasting a particular program –specifically, the Queen's broadcast on January the 1st in downtown London, England?

Todd Schnick: All right. We're doing many SCADA software companies, but you seem to be one of the few that emphasize the water and wastewater industry. Is that true?

Patrick Cooke: I think that's … we've been doing that for now 13 or 14 years. There are other people meaning to catch up to us, but we've recognized that it was an industry that used telemetry or radios much more than most other industrial sectors.

Radios are different. If I'm sitting in a manufacturing plant, I typically have an Ethernet connection or some hardwire connection to my hardware. It's not really a challenge to be able to bring back the information, but – as you're aware from things like online radio – there's only one way of talking to a particular piece of equipment with a radio. And when I have a bunch of different sites, to be able to talk to them via radio is quite a challenge. That was one of the reasons we built a specialized tool specifically for telemetry.

Todd Schnick: Well, Todd and I hail from Atlanta, GA, and the water and sewer system is woefully old...

Todd Youngblood: Woefully old.

Patrick Cooke: Oh, it's older than me.

Todd Schnick: How do you begin … I think that's a process in this system that could really benefit from SCADA technology. How do you begin to communicate and educate to a municipality of, certainly about that size, about the value and power of this thing and how it can improve efficiency and workflow?

Patrick Cooke: I think that's a really tough challenge, especially, for example, in Georgia, where I understand the State has legislated that the utilities had to cut back and consumers, obviously, had to cut back on water consumption. Fortunately or unfortunately, a number of utilities did that; they were highly successful.

In many jurisdictions the water consumption has gone down by as much as 30%. The problem for the utility is now they've lost 30% of their revenue, and their fixed costs are relatively similar.

So it's a process of having to look at a solution, hopefully, that would use most of the hardware that they currently have in place.

Again, that's one of our niches in the marketplace. Our response is not to go and, say, replace everything with something new and beautiful and paint it in nice green or aqua color. Let's see what we can reuse first, and then after we've reused, we'll add or provide a migration process from older technologies to newer technologies.

Todd Schnick: Patrick, a little earlier you were talking about visual tag systems. What is that? Why does somebody care?

Patrick Cooke: Well, essentially what we do in our software is we make an object out of the particular inputs or the outputs, so it's not just some mythical element up in the sky; it's an address for that particular value.

We have set points, we have alarm limits, and I could look at that in the database and that's using, really, the leading edge of C++ programming, or the encapsulation of objects, which is an element of what they call real online figuration.

Todd Schnick: You do a lot of work with radio, do you not? Tell me why.

Patrick Cooke: Well, the radios are a challenge. We look at jurisdictions where they have UHF, where they VHF, we look at things like spread spectrum. We're always playing around with the recognition that the FCC is limiting the number of license frequencies that are available.

And so one of the things that we do do is allow, very often, pieces of hardware that actually talk different languages to share a single radio frequency. In the large metropolitan areas, that's quite an extreme benefit to them.

Todd Youngblood: Patrick, it sounds like from the examples you've given, some of the companies you're dealing with, your customers are very small and some of them are huge on the other end of it. How do you work with both small and large customers and keep from going crazy?

Patrick Cooke: It's a challenge, especially if they've been on The Biggest Loser program. Sorry.

Todd Youngblood: That was good, that was good.

Patrick Cooke: What we did is we built a series of capabilities into a smaller system designed for the guy who really doesn't want to learn a whole bunch of different programs.

On the other side, you're absolutely correct, we have a system up and running in house that has two million inputs and outputs in it, and that's, reasonably, I would think, the largest SCADA system in North America. It means fully scalable, understanding that the problems associated with a very large customer are very different from those associated with a smaller customer.

A lot of that comes from our engineering group, who are involved in providing assistance to large and small utilities. But it does mean that the smaller utilities benefit from some of the capabilities like redundancy, online configuration, which are key to our success at very large, enterprise-wide customers.

Todd Schnick: Patrick, Trihedral is exhibiting here are WEFTEC. What are you all hoping to achieve here? Is this about lead generation, launching new products, market education, identifying new partners? What are your goals here?

Patrick Cooke: Yes.

Todd Schnick: All of the above.

Todd Youngblood: Understood. A, B, C, and D.

Patrick Cooke: Okay. Well we are...

Todd Youngblood: I like a man that's concise.

Patrick Cooke: We are. We are actually launching version 10.1, which will be released in the next couple months. It provides Internet access for iPads, iPhones and Google Android systems, and we recognize that that seems to be the coming wave for SCADA in the future. It's no longer in the mainframe computer somewhere; everything resides in little handheld devices in your back pocket.

Todd Schnick: Okay. We're out of time, Patrick. Before we let you go, share with the audience how they can get in touch with Trihedral and learn more about your work.

Patrick Cooke: Please, we are delighted to hear from you by telephone: 1-800-463-2783 or 1-800-Go-Faster. Or we're online at www.trihedral.com, T-R-I-H-E-D-R-A-L.com.

Todd Schnick: Okay.

Todd Youngblood: I got to say, 1-800-Go-Faster has got to be one of the better phone numbers I have ever heard.

Todd Schnick: Outstanding.

Patrick Cooke: The "R" is optional, by the way.

Todd Schnick: Okay, good. Hey, Patrick, it was a pleasure having you. Thanks for joining us.

Patrick Cooke: Thanks, Todd and Todd.

Todd Youngblood: Thanks, Patrick.

Todd Schnick: Okay, that wraps our segment. On behalf of Todd Youngblood, I'm Todd Schnick. Water Online Radio will be right back.