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Local networking technology veteran Barry Fougere has moved into the cleantech world, joining Needham’s BigBelly Solar Inc. as chief operating officer, to help move the company into its next level of growth, he said.
BigBelly makes a solar-powered trash compactor that it sells primarily to municipalities, universities and facilities. The system also includes wireless connectivity to a type of network management software that helps monitor and control the systems remotely, and experience in networking is part of what Fougere brings to the company, he said. But moving into the cleantech field has been in his plans for a few years.
“I had made the decision a while ago that I personally wanted to migrate my career more in the cleantech direction,” Fougere said. “I had the benefit of a couple of years of looking at the sector.”
Those years were spent at Heidrick & Struggles, a Chicago-based executive search and professional services firm, where Fougere served as a partner and the co-head of the energy efficiency practice. He took that experience to his most recent role as president of Sunapee Advisors, a consulting firm providing strategic support to companies in the energy and resource efficiency sector.
But it is his role as CEO of wireless networking equipment maker Colubris Networks Inc. that he is best known for. Founded in 2000 by CTO Pierre Trudeau, privately-held Colubris had raised more than $50 million in private funding, including a $14 million round in late 2006, before being acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. in August of 2008. Colubris is now the ProCurve division of H-P.
Fougere said that one thing that attracted him specifically to BigBelly was the vision that its founder had for the company.
“I have seen this movie before at Colubris,” he said. “You start with an interesting device, but when you start to stretch that vision, that’s the hook that personally got me very excited.”
BigBelly, founded in 2003, now employs about 30 people. The company has signed some big-names deals, including a strategic partnership with trash collection and disposal giant Waste Management to distribute its compactor nationwide. Also a win for BigBelly is a 10-year deal with the city of Philadelphia that has already seen the city of Brotherly Love install 500 of the units, which are self-powered using solar energy and cost about $4,000.
Fougere said Philadelphia has already been able to drop the number of trips to a trash bin from 17 per week to just seven. And the city has repurposed the man-hours that freed up to launch a recycling program, he said. That is on top of a projected $13 million savings to Philadelphia over the ten years of the deal, he said.
The simplicity of BigBelly’s solution to trash pickup inefficiency was also a big draw for Fougere.
“Its almost a beautifully simple concept,” he said. “We harness the power of the sun to compact trash in an area where power lines aren’t available, I have always just loved that.”
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