Melbourne-based Iota teams with Spark IoT to target the New Zealand market

Auckland-based Spark IoT has inked a partnership with Iota, a subsidiary of Melbourne water authority South East Water, to bring its enterprise internet of things (IoT) platform and smart water meter technology to Aotearoa. 

“As we continue to face the impacts of climate change and more frequent and extreme weather events, it is critical to better understand how precious natural resources such as water is sourced, treated and distributed,” said Spark IoT growth leader Philippe Boulanger.

Advanced digital technologies such as IoT were an important enabler of these processes, he said, due to their near real-time monitoring and detection capabilities over a dedicated, nationwide NB-IoT network.

“IoT is now reaching a level of maturity where they have the potential to solve important challenges where it wasn’t possible in the past,” Boulanger said. 

Iota is well progressed in a project to deploy 70,000 smart water meters for the Toowoomba Regional Council in Queensland.  

The meters and associated data will be managed by Lentic, Iota’s IoT enterprise platform, to give the council accurate data and real-time water usage updates as well as early detection of customer leaks, leading to water savings and improved planning decisions. 

Iota CEO Daniel Sullivan said water authorities deploying large IoT fleets to monitor water and wastewater networks needed to be able to manage the devices and be able to trust the “unprecedented” volumes of data coming in.

“Lentic is the enterprise IoT platform designed by a water utility, with in-built rules and alarms to validate the data and support the many different use cases such as automated customer leak notifications,” he said.

Last year, Spark IoT also announced a partnership with GreenBe, an Australian cloud-based customer engagement solution which utilises data from Lentic to display consumption dashboards for customers and notifications when water usage goes beyond a certain threshold.

GreenBe is already deployed by New Zealand’s Selwyn District Council and has also been deployed at Toowoomba.