THE MAGAZINE FOR THE DRAINAGE, WATER & WASTEWATER INDUSTRIES
WATER PAGES
Which sectors should the water industry look to for examples of best practice?
The big tech firms are, of course, leading the way. Google and similarly Microsoft Office documents are increasingly hosted on the cloud with the option to edit in a browser.
More generally, lessons can be taken from any industry that is customer-facing and trying to meet increasing customer expectations. The financial services sector is an interesting case. High street banks have had to play catch-up with mobile app functionality initially offered by emerging financial technology firms, which became challenger banks with measurable market share.
Where is water lacking in comparison?
Water is a naturally conservative industry with a large legacy asset base, focused on keeping the pipes flowing and maintaining water quality. Globally, the financial incentives to innovate are usually low, particularly where there is risk involved in doing so.
Concerns regarding security of data from a SaaS model remain to varying extents in different parts of the world and there is often
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a legislative need to retain data within the country, or even state, of origin. A particular issue in the UK historically has been that water companies have been incentivised towards up-front expenditure that can be capitalised, rather than the annual recurring expenditure associated with a SaaS model.
What role does innovation play?
The SaaS approach supports innovation by facilitating incremental product developments at affordable costs. This kind of innovation, and in particular extracting more information from existing datasets, represent huge opportunities for water. AlarmVision is a good example of this, helping companies see a bigger picture than they could previously.
Howis Ovarro supporting the water industry in this area?
Our next-generation analytics products are being designed as SaaS products to reduce the costs of configuration, maintenance, support and upgrade. This builds on our expertise from our Primeweb cloud-based system used to manage Ovarro leak
detection hardware.
Further analytics SaaS products are in the pipeline and in varying stages of trials with water company customers.
Howdo you seetheSaaS landscape developing into the 2025-2030 asset management period (AMP8)?
I believe AMP8 is when the industry will shift from on-premises software being the norm to a substantial preference for SaaS solutions, with a proactive rather than reactive attitude to replacing legacy systems. Water companies are starting to learn the lessons from a short-term attitude to technology and the risks associated with infrastructure obsolescence.
Beyond that, I expect that the industry will start to embrace as-a-service models more generally, for example leasing hardware with payment models based upon availability of data.
This then ensures that the client does not get stranded with legacy hardware assets that are incompatible with future communications technology or software requirements.
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