Another venture from Patrick Crais, founder of Blue Watchdog Conservation—which was featured in the July 2014 cover story of Landscape Management, Blue Pandas is a water conservation software company started by Crais and two other engineers, Martin Grant and Tom McKenzie.
The software automates Blue Watchdog’s water management tasks, allowing the company to manage sites more efficiently and enabling its customers to analyze their water use through purchasing the Blue Dashboard program—somewhat of a mainframe for water-users to monitor their consumption and an analytical tool for water agencies.
Accessible via an Internet browser or mobile device, Blue Dashboard is “an online and multiplatform interface that allows water agencies to manage their water conservation programs and also gives a snapshot to their customers of how they are doing in their water consumption against a budget,” Crais says.
Launched in fall 2012, Blue Pandas came about from a lunchtime discussion Crais was having with a friend and as a solution to some of the challenges Blue Watchdog faced and the tools it lacked as a water management company, Crais says.
Grant and McKenzie, former employees of irrigation controller manufacturer ETwater, helped found the company. They developed the original software for its schedule generation, controller communication, web interface, reports and databases. They have worked in the irrigation and water conservation arena for more than 15 years.
