Combining digital meters, dedicated pressure sensors, an NB-IoT network, and an IoT analytics solution, Australian telecommunications company Telstra and German firm Software AG are eyeing to provide a water management-as-a-service solution for Australian utilities.
Proof of concept is underway at Busselton Water, a water corporation which supplies drinking water to more than 26000 people across the Busselton area of Western Australia.
“With water being such a scarce resource, the use of digital technology to help us better monitor and manage our system will be a huge benefit to our business. This is not just in the conservation of water, but in the provision of more reliable, cost-effective water services to our consumer and business customers,” said Chris Elliott, CEO of Busselton Water.
With the new digital automated water management solution, Telstra and Software AG envision to collect available sensor data like pressure, consumption, and alerts such as pressure drops from a new generation of digital water meters managed via Telstra’s IoT platform and the Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT Accelerator running in the cloud.
“The solution offers off-the-shelf tools for monitoring and managing all this data – along with business rules. Dashboards provide users with near real-time full state-of-play at any given time,” Software AG said.
Utilities can also add customizable tools and water utility specific dashboards to monitor other data metrics such as aggregated consumption over time, min/max/average flow and trend analysis, as well as peak and non-peak consumption.
“Water conservation and management is a top priority for many countries, cities and remote areas and we are excited to be helping create a solution that will address this,” said Tony Drewitt, Head of IoT ANZ, Software AG, in a news release.
Telstra has been beefing up its IoT solution in the past year, teaming up with Ericsson for enterprise IoT deployment recently, and previously on the deployment of long range NB-IoT connection.
Software AG, meanwhile, is bullish on the continued growth of IoT use cases across industries. In Asia, recently, it has provided technology for Singapore-based Fullerton Health to transform healthcare through IoT.
Telstra said it will offer the digital automated water management solution to water utilities around Australia either on a stand-alone basis or as part of their end-to-end “IoT for Intelligent Utilities” package.
