An old generator has a useful quality that the technology business sometimes undervalues: it may still work. The problem arrives when someone wants it to share information with a newer machine, a remote operator or a piece of software written long after its installation. Brad Witter built much of his career in that awkward space between a working device and a useful connection. A building full of equipment can resemble a dinner party at which everybody has brought a different dictionary.
Witter co-founded Blue Pillar in 2006. He was its chief executive when Generac acquired the company in October 2022. In between came the work of making industrial equipment communicate across manufacturers, models and generations. His story runs through electrical engineering, enterprise software, a move back to Indiana and a business whose usefulness depended on respecting what customers already owned.
The appeal is easy to miss from a distance. A connected dashboard is pleasant to look at. The work that makes its numbers appear is less photogenic. Yet that work is where Witter’s professional history becomes interesting: at the point where a promise about software must survive contact with an actual machine.
A founder’s geography, in household numbers
One number in Witter’s early company story was $14,000. In the Atlanta area, that was the annual private-school cost he described for each of his three school-age children. Building a startup while meeting those expenses made the family arithmetic consequential. In 2011, he agreed to move Blue Pillar to Indianapolis. Living costs were a substantial part of his explanation when he discussed the decision in 2014.
He had grown up in Indiana. The move therefore joined a familiar place to a practical financial consideration. The details resist the polished version of entrepreneurship in which a founder selects a location solely by surveying talent pools and drawing arrows on a map. A company’s runway and a household’s bills can occupy the same sheet of paper.
That episode gives the career a human scale. Witter was making decisions about an industrial technology company while managing the ordinary costs of raising children. The move deserves its place alongside the product and acquisition dates because it describes a condition under which the work could continue. Even a business devoted to remote monitoring has to be built somewhere.
The work beneath the dashboard
Before Blue Pillar, Witter studied electrical engineering at Purdue University, attending from 1991 to 1995. His career began at Caterpillar in controls and supervisory systems. He later led technology at Advanced Interface Solutions, known as AISi, a systems integrator and distributor of Wonderware-based solutions. At NNC Group, he became chief technology officer; Stericycle acquired that software-based logistics business in 2005.
The sequence puts machinery and software beside each other well before Blue Pillar. Controls engineering concerns what equipment does and how an operator can supervise it. Systems integration concerns the difficult joins between products. A software logistics business brings another setting in which useful information has to travel. Witter’s next company brought these strands into the energy equipment customers had already installed.
In 2013, four Duke business students visited Witter and Blue Pillar’s then-CEO, Kevin Kushman, in Indianapolis. They were investigating the microgrid market with investor Paul Straub of Claremont Creek Ventures. The students came away describing a company that could connect assets without tying customers to a single equipment maker, install quickly and accommodate additional devices.
They also recorded the team’s enthusiasm for being “duct tape programmers.” It is a pleasingly unceremonious phrase for a venture-backed software company. It suggests people willing to work with the awkward materials at hand. Duct tape receives few invitations to strategy meetings, although it has probably rescued a fair number of them.
“duct tape programmers”
The Blue Pillar team, as described by visiting Duke students in 2013
The students’ account also exposed a business tension: the startup was thinking about the next customer while its investor was thinking about the next industry. Both concerns were reasonable. Solving a particular installation creates value today. Repeating the work across different customers is what allows a company to grow beyond a succession of custom jobs.
A patent is a very particular autobiography
Witter’s name appears as Bradley Jay Witter on Blue Pillar patent records. In 2015, he and Kyle Patrick Zeronik were named on a granted patent for monitoring and controlling industrial energy equipment. The described system uses configurable interfaces and definitions that identify information within industrial devices. It offers a technical answer to a basic operational wish: let the software read the equipment and send it a command.
The same two inventors appear on a 2016 patent concerning vulnerability assessment for networks of industrial automation devices. Another record, granted in October 2017, names Witter alongside Thomas Joseph Butler, Joseph J. Scoufis and Eric D. Reichel for systems and methods for testing emergency power supplies. These were collaborative inventions, with Blue Pillar as the original assignee.
The testing patent describes bringing together operational information from equipment of different vendors, makes and models. Its concern is consistency: the operator should be able to see a facility’s equipment together even when the underlying hardware differs. Read that way, the technical record adds texture to the founder biography. The names and dates document years spent on the details concealed by the word “platform.”
An early Blue Pillar product called Avise shows what some of those details meant in use. Its capabilities included remote monitoring, configurable tests, alarms, historical records and reports. In a technical case study, Witter praised development tools that reduced the work needed to build the application. The practical instinct is visible there too: use available components so the team can spend its effort on the customer’s problem.
Avise’s specifications went down to the routines of running a facility. Operators could configure how often records were logged and send those records to more than one destination. They could view equipment remotely, receive event notifications and examine reports afterward. These are modest verbs beside the sweeping language that often accompanies a new technology: view, record, notify, review. They also describe the things an operator needs to do. The details help explain why integration can be valuable long before anyone invents a new machine.
Summer camp, with a data connection
At Bar-T Mountainside Summer Camp in Frederick, Maryland, the equipment had a setting considerably more cheerful than the usual industrial diagram. The 115-acre campus became the site of a microgrid project led by TimberRock. In 2019, its energy systems included rooftop solar and distributed battery storage. Blue Pillar provided connectivity and control technology within the wider project.
The division of work matters. Blue Pillar gathered and moved real-time information from the electrical system into TimberRock’s management platform. An IoT gateway and an application programming interface carried that data onward. TimberRock used the information for its energy management functions. Witter, then Blue Pillar’s chief technology officer, described access to utility and building meters alongside generation and storage assets.
energy assets
connectivity
energy software
This is a useful way to understand Witter’s contribution without assigning him the work of every organization involved. A meter measures. Storage holds energy. Management software makes use of information. The connection lets those separate functions participate in a larger system. The campus example gives the abstract language of distributed energy a physical address and a manageable cast of characters.
In June 2017, Blue Pillar had announced that its Aurora Energy Network-as-a-Service offering was powered by Microsoft Azure. Witter’s stated aim was to reduce the barriers to connecting and controlling distributed resources. The offering covered a broad mixture of equipment, including meters, generators, storage and solar. Using cloud infrastructure addressed the other end of the problem: handling fleets spread across locations.
By November 2020, Blue Pillar was partnering with DVL Group on OnsitePower, a service for remote generator monitoring and control. Customers could connect through a computer or mobile phone. Witter described an ambition to make sophisticated industrial IoT available with less expense and complexity. The recurring concern was the effort required to obtain a useful result.
When connectivity moves into the factory
Generac’s purchase of Blue Pillar closed on October 3, 2022, and was announced the following day. The businesses already shared customers and had worked together. The acquisition brought the connectivity developer into a manufacturer that wanted monitoring and control integrated into its power generation products. It changed where the connection could begin: inside the product offering itself.
In 2023, Witter described industrial customers who expected equipment at work to be as easy to connect as devices at home. He also described the question beneath customers’ integration concerns: “How painful is this going to be for the benefits I gain?” It is an unusually plain test of a technology proposition. The customer has a job to do and would prefer the new system not become another one.
His public career continued at Generac, including leadership of Energy Services. That business combined grid services and industrial connectivity responsibilities. A 2026 conference program still listed him under the Energy Services title, placing him in the continuing conversation about power infrastructure. The founding chapter had become part of a larger company’s work.
There is a consistent thread through the changing titles. Witter’s projects concern the equipment already standing in buildings, the information operators need from it and the practical effort of bringing the two together. The machinery may be old; the need to understand it remains immediate. A working generator has earned a certain respect. Giving it a useful connection is a reasonable way to show it.