It’s been a little more than a year since the launch of UtiliOS, a platform created to help Water Utilities, along with Commercial & Industrial facilities, with meter management and data analytics. Its CEO, Mark Jeremy, reflects on the year and reveals interesting insights into rising markets and the challenges driving people to adopt new technologies like UtiliOS.
“We’re experiencing a rising trend in the need to manage and monitor water consumption within the Commercial & Industrial segments,” Mr Jeremy said.
UtiliOS added over 1,800 Commercial & Industrial metering points to its visualisation platform in 2022, and it’s expecting that to increase in FY24, with just one company wanting over 1,000.
Mr Jeremy said sustainability and ESG are certainly key drivers.
Investors and capital markets are increasingly looking critically at their portfolios’ sustainability and ESG credentials, especially in the property sector.
“They want verifiable data that withstands scrutiny from stakeholders who demand stronger guarantees around sustainable practices and climate action. Accurately measuring water is key to that, both as a resource, as well its large carbon footprint due to the multitude of pumps and supporting infrastructure.”
UtiliOS collects data from smart water meters used by water utility providers and large commercial and industrial water users; with a user-friendly platform, it can quickly advise on leakages and their location with customised alarms through SMS, email, or APIs. It also produces meaningful reports that allow its customers to maximise value for their business or operation by taking immediate action that improves water management efficiency and saves money.
“The lack of commercial customer monitoring programs available through Water Utilities, I believe, is also playing a part in property and facility managers taking water monitoring into their own hands and engaging directly with companies like us,” Mr Jeremy said.
Leaks don’t just cause water waste. Burst or leaking water mains regularly undermine roads and buildings, with expensive civil engineering consequences for local governments responsible for water and roads.
Property managers are also looking for granular data to minimise billing inaccuracies and reduce bill shock.
For instance, a building manager using UtiliOS can find a burst pipe in the basement of a building or a running toilet on the seventh floor within hours rather than waiting for a water bill to show up. A running toilet uses nine litres of water a minute, so water losses don’t take long to add up.
“Historically, you required an expensive monitoring system using sophisticated leak detection. Now with low-cost IoT (internet of things) devices – it reduces the cost of measuring leakage, bringing real value with ROIs of less than 12 months,” Mr Jeremy said.
“UtiliOS is agnostic and works with all smart water metering vendors and LPWANs (Low-power wireless networks). If you don’t have a solution, we can discuss options, referring you to one of our resellers or providing customised integration into any system, billing, or ERP [Environmental Reporting Platform] such as Envizi, now owned by IBM.
“Within the Water Utility market, for example, they often try more than one type of meter; with UtiliOS, they can view all their meters simultaneously in one place and don’t have to swap between platforms.”
Mr Jeremy said the key with the software is not just displaying the information but also putting it into a format so that people can view meaningful data that they can act on.
“Taking action is the most important thing to create value, i.e. saving water and money. UtiliOS is all about making this as easy as possible!
“Visualising data provides a high-value benefit in the fresh-water-constrained world we live in. It will undoubtedly be the case again now that BOM’s long-term forecast is for drier conditions with an El Nino WATCH currently in place.”
This sponsored editorial is brought to you by UtiliOS. For further information, please visit https://utilios.io/
