Published on the 17/03/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Mining and other asset-rich industries are in line to be transformed by IoT deployments and tighter IT/operations integration say experts…
Given the anticipated rise of internet-of-things deployments, the number of assets that need to be tracked in businesses is likely to soar in the future. Sweden-based IFS specialises in delivering ERP platforms asset-rich organisations which require platforms to help with asset tracking, such as the mining sector. It has had an A/NZ focus for the last six years, led locally by managing director A/NZ Rob Stummer.
Chief executive officer Alastair Sorbie, who was in Australia last week said: “We sell very asset intensive solutions where it is very important to feed back information (from the asset) to the host. That is the sweet spot for us.” He also said customers are now talking about IoT deployments.
“For our customers this points to better return on investment, better service level and real-time information.”
It is also the start of the much-vaunted tighter integration between IT and operations technology which Gartner has been championing, particularly for asset intensive industries. It will be an issue under the spotlight at the Austmine 2015 conference being held in Brisbane in May, when Alcoa CIO Peter Stamp will present on the need to establish an information infrastructure capable of supporting tighter IT/OT links.
Austmine CEO Christine Gibbs-Stewart said that IoT deployments were not yet widespread, but were under discussion, having been recognised as another example of how technology was transforming mining. It’s not just mining that’s being transformed. Sorbie said that in the future it might be possible for companies to place sensors on oceangoing vessels, and then have data fed back to the ERP which would alert the owner of the vessel when it needed to be painted in order to prevent corrosion.
With regards IFS’s local business its overall A/NZ customer numbers have grown to 40, however it has seen the number of New Zealand clients halve over the last 12 months. A year ago Stummer said that IFS had six New Zealand customers, but that has now dwindled to three, although the company later clarified this was the number of paying customers – some companies still use IFS but are no longer paying maintenance or support fees, and one pair of users has merged in the last year.
The majority of IFS’s sales have been on premise, although it has deployed hosted solutions, particularly in Western Australia. Sorbie said that it was now working with a Melbourne-based client which planned to deploy IFS in Microsoft’s Azure cloud, with IFS providing managed services around that deployment.
Stummer said that data sovereignty was a problem for many IFS customers, and that to address that the company had forged a local partnership with Microsoft to offer its system on the local instance of the Azure cloud.
