Greetings from the other side of the world! The Caravela team is in Europe, where a meeting of the minds has been taking place in Munich, Germany at IFAT, the world’s leading trade fair for people who care about water – like us.
As IoT specialists, we see a huge opportunity for more water treatment facilities, municipal water departments, natural resources advocates and more to leverage the technology to better their businesses, public health and the environment.
What are our takeaways from our trip to IFAT?
- Munich is a fabulous venue for this show with a world-class public transportation system in a city of 1.5 million people. Its Underground train system extends into the suburbs. It is clean, safe, punctual, and is tied into their bus and tram system with information about the stops in German and English languages. It’s hard to think of a better host city for such a show.
- There are literally no other companies like Caravela. Not just because we’re great people to work with and incredibly smart (and good looking, too, if we do say so ourselves … ha!) – it turns out that there is a total absence of companies like Caravela that specialize in engineered IoT and machine learning solutions for manufacturing and industrial processes related to the water, sewage, waste and raw materials management industries.
- The extent of the adoption of IoT is limited to fleet management and asset tracking where a significant number of companies are vying for business.
- Some companies offer proprietary analytics software packages tracking water volume throughput while others specialize in liquids leak detection and remediation.
- There were dozens of sludge-drying companies, pipe manufacturers, valve specialists and other companies competing for primacy in their field of specialization. The total number of manufacturers with integrated IoT processes that differentiate their products from those of their competitors and allow them to sell new products to their customers – none, not one, zero.
- We learned an enormous amount at the show about potential applications and talked to a great many enthusiastic sales people.
- We were humbled by the language skills of so many of the participants in the show.
The purpose of attending the global water conference was to see how others in the industry worldwide are implementing of the Internet of Things (IoT). Turns out, we’re far ahead of the curve here in the Midwest.
Our next job is to digest the things we learned at IFAT and plan our strategy for how to respond to the market opportunity for Caravela. Have an idea to collaborate with us? Let us know. Otherwise, stay tuned for more news, and thanks for reading this blog post.
