Cloud software could offer new approach to asset management

Companies could gain from putting their asset management efforts in cloud rather than on-premise, according a software company.

Rather than installing software on on-premise infrastructure, Kevin Price, EAM director at business application software firm Infor said using cloud-based enterprise asset management (EAM) software would reduce the costs of maintaining the software and ease the upgrade process.

He said that cost savings are now "more imperative now than ever for most companies" and cloud-based software for asset management was now a "very affordable option because it eliminates the need to expand IT infrastructure."

"Not only does EAM in the cloud provide connectivity and data consistency for all locations and remote users, it also prepares companies for future expansion by removing the burden of upgrades and data backup," said Price.

At the company’s annual customer forum in South Carolina, cloud-based asset management was one of the most discussed topics. Customers who implemented the asset management SaaS said that one of the other benefits was greater awareness of costs in the enterprise.

“One of the biggest challenges that we had as a new company in a new industry was obtaining true operating costs for our sites, as well as localizing data instead of having it at each site and on different servers,” said Larry Spring, CMMS coordinator at green energy company Invenergy.  “With the hosted environment, it’s all in one place, and we have much greater corporate visibility to reach in and take a look at the data.”

But costs were the main consideration for some customers.

“When we initially evaluated solutions, our IT staff was smaller, and we didn’t want to invest the money for all the equipment and hardware needed for a self-hosted product,” said Jimmie Ellington, CMMS project manager at Keystone Foods. “We also knew that we needed to back up our information and wanted to have a secure system, so we decided to go with the hosted environment and let Infor take care of all the IT processes.”

Stephen Tatton, business systems and new technology manager at aerospace technology firm JBT AeroTech said that since being a hosted customer the firm only suffered had two instances where the system has been down since 2002, one of which was an upgrade.

“We’re up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and working in airport environments, this is very critical to us.”