Itus Digital: Next Generation APM Software Focused On Rapid Time To Value

Itus Digital: Next Generation APM Software Focused On Rapid Time To Value

In recent years, the rise of digital strategies at industrial firms has driven demand for more technologies which enhance asset management. We forecast that global spending on asset performance management (APM) software and services will reach $2.5 billion in 2020. Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic and lower oil price will slow spending in some industries, one unanticipated outcome of the crisis has been broader executive buy-in to the need to digitize industrial processes. So spending on digital technologies for remote condition monitoring and asset management will increase in 2021.

Against this backdrop, APM software veterans Joe Nichols and Jason Cline co-founded Itus Digital. This new venture, headquartered in Virginia, is focused on the active management of asset failure risk through the deployment of equipment-level digital twins. Reflecting on their experience at Meridium and GE Digital, the Itus Digital team are laser focused on ease of deployment, time to value, user experience and empowering equipment experts. This vision also aligns them with industries which have not traditionally invested in APM solutions which were designed for the most asset intensive, always-on, process industries.

Itus Digital aims to leapfrog established competitors by leveraging new cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence and more efficient software development tools to deliver at a lower price point. For instance, the Itus Digital plan is to develop a single code base for on premise, cloud and hybrid deployment. The product will be centred on creating asset reliability digital twins for widely used equipment categories such as heat exchangers and centrifugal pumps. At the outset this approach makes sense as the investment required to build a complete APM solution comparable to the offerings from AVEVA, Bentley Systems or GE Digital is beyond the means of a start-up. The pre-release version of the Itus Digital product seen by the Verdantix analyst team has a clean, tile-based user interface which meets the usability requirements of reliability engineers. The asset reliability content library covers 181 equipment classes, 1,396 failure modes, 845 maintenance activity and 1514 condition-based protections.

Itus Digital is entering a market with at least 20 competing vendors of which Verdantix benchmarked 11 in our recent Green Quadrant on APM Solutions. Key success factors for APM software include ease of integration with process historians, synchronization with maintenance software, usability for diverse users, and analytics pre-packaged with failure mode content. More importantly, customers expect to see APM solutions designed for their specific asset class which is how vendors like Hitachi ABB Power Grids and DNV GL have succeeded in segments like power networks and oil and gas pipelines. To succeed in a market shaped by industry solutions, the Itus Digital team will need to articulate how their equipment-level asset reliability digital twins solve uptime and maintenance problems for an entire power station, chemical plant or oil rig.

For more information on asset management technologies read our reports: Tech Roadmap For Asset Management Technologies, Green Quadrant Asset Performance Management Solutions 2020