Verdigris + ABB | Proven Integration with Ekip Smart Fit & Ability

Verdigris is the validated layer for ABB estates. It provides 8 kHz waveform intelligence on Verdigris EV2 sensors that augments ABB Ability and Ekip Smart Fit without replacing them. The partnership is proven, not theoretical. Through ABB's Open Innovation program, Verdigris built apps on the ABB Ability Electrical Distribution Control System (EDCS), and Verdigris EV2 hardware has been deployed alongside Ekip Smart Fit retrofit sensors. If your facility runs SACE Emax, Tmax, or Ekip-equipped switchgear, the integration is already validated at the circuit and waveform level against ABB telemetry. The protocol path is settled. The waveform plumbing is settled.

At a glance

ABB Ability is broad. It spans marine, mining, manufacturing, utilities, buildings, electrification, and data centers. Verdigris is narrow. We focus exclusively on electrical intelligence for MW-class critical facilities. The architectural complement is straightforward. ABB Ability handles device-level condition reporting from Ekip; Verdigris adds continuous 8 kHz waveform coverage from EV2 sensors across the full power path and becomes the system of record as the substrate. Intelligence flows back to your existing dashboards through MQTT, REST, Modbus, and BACnet emulation. Your ABB estate keeps doing what it does well at the breaker and the switchgear.

Key takeaways

ABB and Verdigris have a proven integration history through ABB's Open Innovation program. Verdigris built apps on ABB Ability EDCS, and Verdigris hardware was tested with Ekip Smart Fit.
Verdigris EV2 sensors clamp on any circuit and continuously capture waveforms at 8 kHz on Verdigris's own sensors. The 8 kHz lives on EV2, not on inferred data from ABB devices.
ABB Ability covers 7 industries (marine, mining, manufacturing, utilities, buildings, electrification, data centers). Verdigris specializes in electrical intelligence for MW-class critical facilities. Together they form a vendor-neutral validated layer on top of ABB credibility at the breaker.
Integration is outbound. Verdigris intelligence reaches your ABB dashboards and operator workflows via MQTT, REST, Modbus, and BACnet emulation, surfacing waveform anomalies and harmonic alarms to the BMS. BACnet emulation means zero BMS reconfiguration.
Customer trigger phrases this page addresses: "ABB Ability already has analytics" and "We have Ekip Smart Fit sensors."

A proven Verdigris–ABB integration

In 2019, ABB and Verdigris announced a joint development through ABB's Open Innovation program. Verdigris built Energy Forecasting and Intelligent Alerts apps, using machine learning trained on circuit-level 8 kHz waveforms, for the ABB Ability EDCS. Verdigris EV2 sensors were tested and validated with Ekip Smart Fit, ABB's retrofit sensor family that turns existing switchgear into connected assets without a full hardware refresh.

The strategic logic is the same today. ABB has global brand presence and channel reach across EMEA, North America, and APAC. ABB switchgear is everywhere: Tmax molded-case breakers, SACE Emax air breakers, and the Ekip trip-unit family span industrial and commercial estates worldwide. Verdigris built apps for ABB Ability and proved hardware-level interoperability with Ekip Smart Fit at the circuit and sensor level. That history shortens the integration sequence on your facility, because the protocol path and the waveform plumbing are already settled.

If you are evaluating Verdigris on an ABB estate, the conversation skips the "does it talk to our hardware" step and moves directly to where Verdigris adds 8 kHz waveform intelligence on top of the existing Ekip and Ability telemetry stack.

What ABB does well

ABB's electrical engineering pedigree runs deep. The Ekip family of intelligent trip units sits inside SACE Emax and Tmax circuit breakers worldwide, delivering overcurrent protection, RMS metering, and connected services through ABB Ability. Ekip Smart Fit retrofits the same telemetry pipeline onto older switchgear without forcing a hardware refresh. Ekip captures the load current at the moment of trip, reports whether the trip unit itself is healthy, and feeds Ability with structured device events including over-current and ground-fault triggers. ABB Ability Marketplace apps extend the platform with switchgear health analytics, thermal monitoring, and asset-management modules sized for MW-scale facilities. The installed base across EMEA and APAC is broad. The service network is established. Ekip works.

This is the right place for device-level intelligence: inside the breaker, at the protection boundary. ABB designed Ekip to own that layer, and it owns it well at the device.

Why not deploy Ekip Smart Fit at high frequency everywhere?

Ekip Smart Fit captures sub-cycle data on protective events. ABB Ability ingests at facility cadence (seconds-to-minutes polling). Verdigris EV2 sensors install on the same critical-power circuits and capture continuously at 8 kHz on Verdigris's own acquisition layer; Ekip telemetry can be ingested alongside as supplementary context. The same physical phenomena are observable at the circuit, but Verdigris propagates them continuously into the substrate where ML models run, not event-triggered forensic capture that stays at the meter.

Architecturally, Ekip Smart Fit captures sub-cycle data on protective events: trip current and voltage signatures at the moment of the event. ABB Ability polls at seconds-to-minutes cadence, the correct regime for facility-level monitoring breadth, but the wrong regime for continuous waveform-at-scale on a critical power path. High-frequency capability exists at the sensor; the analytics layer above is tuned for breadth, not sub-cycle propagation.

Verdigris's pretrained ML for UPS rectifier degradation, capacitor ESR drift, and harmonic failure signatures complements ABB Ability's facility-breadth analytics. Verdigris is purpose-built for critical-power electrical intelligence; ABB Ability spans 7 industries from marine to data centers.

This is what the Verdigris + ABB Ekip Smart Fit collaboration proved: same physical capability at the sensor, continuous propagation into the substrate above. Verdigris analytics can also embed back into ABB Ability via the Marketplace app integration path. Your ABB Ability dashboards extend with Verdigris-grade electrical intelligence.

Where ABB Ability's analytics layer reaches its limit

ABB Ability uses facility-cadence ingest. Verdigris captures 480,000 samples in that window

ABB's strength is breadth. Ability spans 7 industries: marine, mining, manufacturing, utilities, buildings, electrification, and data centers. Each industry inherits common modules (energy KPIs, alarm management, asset health) adapted to the typical hardware mix.

Breadth is the design choice. It pays for itself across industries. It also bounds what the analytics layer reaches.

For an AI factory operator, two architectural realities follow from that breadth.

First, Ability's analytics layer is tuned for facility-level KPIs: kWh by feeder, peak kW demand, alarm rollups, asset uptime. The cadence and granularity that reach the analytics layer are aligned to that view, not to sub-cycle electrical phenomena (microsecond arc-fault precursors, 8-millisecond GPU transients, hour-scale harmonic drift on capacitor banks) that predict equipment failure on critical power paths.

Second, ABB Ability is optimized for ABB. Ekip Smart Fit and the Marketplace apps assume ABB switchgear and ABB-bundled telemetry. When a real AI factory power path includes Schneider transformers, Eaton UPS rectifiers, Vertiv PDUs, third-party busways, and OEM-agnostic cooling motor inverters alongside ABB breakers, the single-vendor analytics view stops at the brand boundary.

A short list of electrical phenomena that predict equipment failure lives in the milliseconds, not in facility-level KPIs:

GPU workload transients on Blackwell training jobs ramp in roughly 8 milliseconds.
Arc-fault precursors show up as sub-cycle current spikes, exactly the regime IEEE 1584 defines for arc-flash incident energy.
Harmonic content shifts that precede capacitor failure register as waveform-shape changes, not as polled RMS readings, and IEEE 519 names them as a dominant source of nuisance protection trips.
Rectifier output ripple that flags diode aging stays hidden in a facility-level energy dashboard. At 8 kHz on Verdigris EV2 sensors, it is obvious.

This is not a criticism of ABB Ability. It is a description of the analytics layer above the one ABB Ability was built to own. That layer needs 8 kHz waveform context. Isolated alarms become validated electrical degradation evidence.

How Verdigris adds value to your ABB estate

Verdigris physically instruments the power path. Verdigris EV2 sensors clamp on circuits anywhere from utility transformer secondaries to PDU outputs to rack busway taps. Installation is non-invasive: clamp-on CTs on existing wiring, no shutdowns, no rewiring, no electrical-work scheduling required. Continuous 8 kHz waveform capture (8,000 samples per second per circuit) runs on Verdigris's own EV2 sensors across greyspace, whitespace, and the server power shelf, the four-zone deployment model that defines Verdigris coverage from utility edge to rack.

Four capabilities Verdigris adds on top of Ekip and Ability

On top of that sensor floor, Verdigris delivers four capabilities ABB Ability's facility-cadence analytics layer is architecturally not built to provide.

Continuous sub-cycle condition monitoring at 8 kHz waveform resolution. Waveform-shape changes, not polled RMS values, surface harmonic, transient, and ripple signatures hours to weeks before threshold-based alarms fire.
Vendor-neutral path coverage. One Verdigris deployment spans ABB breakers, Schneider transformers, Eaton UPS, Vertiv PDUs, and cross-vendor cooling motor branches in a single canonical model.
Validated operating limits: physics-grounded capacity headroom, what is actually safe to schedule against the current condition of the equipment, measured against IEEE 519 harmonic envelopes and the thermal limits Ekip already enforces.
Pre-threshold advance warning: degradation visible 14 to 21 days before standard polling-driven alarms fire, leaving operators a real maintenance window rather than an emergency response.

The output flows back. Verdigris is the system of record as the substrate, and ABB Ability stays the system of record for device-level condition and overcurrent protection. Together they give you facility-level visibility from ABB plus circuit-level 8 kHz waveform physics from Verdigris, with intelligence routed into the workflow your team already uses.

How does Verdigris integrate with ABB Ability?

Integration is outbound. Verdigris EV2 sensors install on circuits and capture 8 kHz waveforms continuously. Verdigris ingests ABB telemetry as supplementary context where useful. Verdigris becomes the canonical model as the substrate, and intelligence reaches your existing systems through four production-validated surfaces.

Surface	Protocol	What it carries
MQTT broker	Pub/sub	Verdigris-hosted, real-time telemetry to SRE and IT observability stacks
REST API	Request/response	Programmatic access to historical and real-time electrical state
Modbus	OT field protocol	Production-validated downstream feed to BMS, DCIM, and SCADA layers
BACnet emulation	OT field protocol	Verdigris sensors appear as native BACnet devices on the operator network. Zero BMS reconfiguration required.

BACnet emulation is the meaningful difference for an ABB shop. Operators do not have to open a BMS integration project, swap BACnet drivers, or co-engineer with ABB Ability's connected-services team to surface Verdigris intelligence on their existing dashboards. The Verdigris sensor appears as a native BACnet device on the operator network. The dashboard sees it. Ekip continues to handle the device-level alarms and trip protection. Ability continues to surface switchgear condition and harmonic alarms to the service team. Nothing in the ABB workflow changes.

For estates with deeper integration appetite, Verdigris 8 kHz waveform analytics can also be embedded inside ABB Ability as a Marketplace app, the path the original Open Innovation work demonstrated.

Customer proof

In a deployment across 800+ UPS rectifiers at T-Mobile, Verdigris detected active electrical degradation in roughly 4% of monitored units (about 32 rectifiers) approximately 21 days before any standard threshold would have fired. Twenty-one days is a maintenance window. A polling-driven alarm delivers a fault, not a forecast.

T-Mobile's Senior Director of Infrastructure and Engineering described the outcome this way:

"Verdigris Signals gives us visibility into degradation patterns that don't appear in polled monitoring, enabling us to maintain our reliability leadership position while optimizing capital allocation."

Senior Director, Infrastructure and Engineering, T-Mobile

A separate enterprise deployment at a US carrier surfaced the same pattern. Infrastructure engineer Scott Dworkis put it this way:

"You're likely to learn surprising patterns once you start digging into the data, and that was certainly the case for us."

Scott Dworkis, Infrastructure Engineer

Andrea Temporiti, Digital Leader for ABB's Electrification Business, described the joint Verdigris–ABB Energy Forecasting service in the 2019 announcement this way:

"This innovative digital service makes it easy to take the necessary corrective actions to minimize any peak demand charges. The precision of the forecasting reduces hedging positions, narrows variability and produces meaningful energy cost savings for commercial and industrial buildings."

Andrea Temporiti, Digital Leader, Electrification Business, ABB

The proof point that matters specifically for an ABB conversation: Verdigris EV2 hardware has already been tested with ABB Ekip Smart Fit, and Verdigris waveform-trained software has already shipped on ABB Ability EDCS. The integration risk is materially lower than starting from a clean sheet on a new vendor pairing.

How it deploys in an ABB shop

A European data center operator runs ABB SACE Emax breakers with Ekip trip units, and ABB Ability handles switchgear condition monitoring at facility-level 1-second cadence (not continuous 8 kHz waveform). The operator wants pre-threshold visibility on critical circuits feeding GPU rows without disrupting the ABB workflow the operations team already uses.

The deployment looks like this. Verdigris EV2 sensors clamp on circuits feeding the GPU rows: transformer secondaries, PDU outputs, rack busway taps. No shutdowns. No electrical-work permits. Continuous 8 kHz waveform capture starts on day one on Verdigris's own sensors. Ekip continues device-level alarming and trip protection. Ability continues to surface switchgear health to the service team. Verdigris intelligence routes back to the operator's BMS as a native BACnet device, so the BMS sees Verdigris as another BACnet endpoint with no integration project required.

A few weeks into the deployment, Verdigris flags a slowly worsening sub-cycle harmonic signature on a transformer secondary. The waveform signature points to insulation degradation. The Ability dashboard shows nothing. A polled threshold-driven view at 1-second cadence would not catch this signature until much later. The maintenance team has roughly two weeks of advance warning. They schedule the inspection during a planned window and avoid an unscheduled GPU-row outage during a training run.

That is the validated layer in production on an ABB estate. Ekip protects against overcurrent faults consistent with NFPA 70 protection coordination. Ability surfaces device condition. Verdigris adds the sub-cycle waveform physics across the full path, vendor-neutral, with intelligence routed into the workflow your operators already use.