Intertrust Technologies: Digitizing and Decarbonizing the Electrical Grid

In spring 2023, Talal Shamoon, CEO of Intertrust Technologies Corporation (Intertrust), was planning the next phase of growth. Intertrust focused on enabling trust over open networks. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, it had created much of the data rights management and media security technology that kept the internet working by enabling the exchange and transaction of digital media such as audio and video files. With the increasing urgency to address climate change, it was clear that the future electrical grid would be more decentralized, drawing on a complex network of wind farms, solar panels, and household systems, with new opportunities through the rising internet of things. Anticipating these changes, Intertrust had invested heavily in energy rights management solutions. Since its first energy-specific financing round back in 2016, it had aimed its solutions at energy companies, enabling them to take control of their data and decipher the energy data ecosystem. While the company did not want to get caught up in the latest artificial intelligence (AI) hype cycle, its solutions would facilitate the application of AI models. Should Intertrust create an all-in-one data rights platform for energy utilities to manage their data operations? Or should it bring the entire energy industry together and define the interoperability parameters so that data operations could be standardized? Or should Intertrust focus on only the right product-market fit for its data rights management product with minimal investments? The choice would define the future of the firm. At the Darden School of Business, this case is taught in the second-year “Strategy in the Digital Age” elective course; it would also be suitable in a module covering platform technologies and AI strategy.