With the motto of “Smart solutions for a sustainable future”, ista Middle East appointed Tolga Candan as the Director of Digitalization and IoT, marking a new era for helping the buildings of the GCC region to reach their full potential in terms of energy efficiency and operational excellence.

Oliver Sporrer, Regional Managing Director of ista Middle East, commented, “Climate protection is at the heart of ista, and the Middle East has the most demanding built environment where technology can deliver a significant difference with simple yet effective solutions towards energy costs and carbon footprint improvement. Reinforced with Tolga’s joining, today marks a new chapter in our endeavour to match the best solutions addressing the problems in buildings.”

Tolga Candan is a multidiscipline engineer, MSc, MBA with experience ranging from commercial leadership to successful delivery of on-site engineering activities. He possesses 19 years of experience with 15 years being in UAE and the Gulf region in both pre and post-operation of buildings. Tolga has been instrumental in addressing energy optimisation & technology retrofit requirements in a wide range of segments such as hotels, power plants, schools, high-rise mixed-use developments, residential villa compounds, industrial, golf courses, shopping malls, etc. Known for his expertise in HVAC, air quality, pumps, IoT and energy optimization, he is now heading the strategic business development of ista with a focus on UAE and neighbouring regions.

Tolga, Director of Digitalization and IoT, commented, “ista’s competency in IoT and energy retrofits is already addressing the majority of the problems which I’ve observed during my assessments in 300+ facilities in the middle east over the past years. I’m very excited that now we can provide a full-fledged solution from not only assessment and engineering but also execution to monitoring and sustain as a one-stop shop for greener and smarter buildings. People deserve the 2022’s technologies to be adapted in their buildings as well, regardless of how old they are.”

Apart from the core business of submetering and billing, ista also offers energy audits and retrofits (accredited by ADES, Etihad ESCO and REEM), Delta-T rectification, pump optimization, remote-control SmartValve (Empower approved), indoor air monitoring, MinuteView cloud dashboard for energy management, segment specific IoT Bundles.  

According to The Economist, The Internet of Things will bring the internet’s business model to the rest of the world. The aggregate score for the application of IoT to internal operations jumped from 4.34 in 2017 to 6.82 in 2020. This means the typical company’s IoT initiatives went from “planning” three years ago to being firmly in the “early implementation” phase today. The research also shows that the most widely adopted applications of IoT data are monitoring and optimizing the performance of products or internal operations (43%) and using IoT data to inform operational decision-making (41%).