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How RedEye Advances Asset Management
A RedEye user makes notes in the field.
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ater and power utilities, as well as companies like mining and oil and gas companies, manage large assets and sophisticated infrastructure networks. When it comes time to repair them, expand them, or build around them, precise knowledge of their construction, condition, size, and location is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, this is a challenge for many companies. Their engineering data may be scattered in different locations or be otherwise difficult to access. That is the problem that Australian company RedEye was founded to solve. It has built a cloud-native data platform to bring all of a company’s engineering data into one place and allow company employees and third-party contractors to access it. In this interview, RedEye chief executive officer (CEO) Wayne Gerard speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company and how it can help municipal water utilities manage their assets. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
Wayne Gerard: When RedEye started in 2012, it was just me and two software engineers. Today, we have close to 100 staff spread across six offices. Our headquarters are in Brisbane, Australia. About 60 of our staff are there. We have three offices in North America, in Las Vegas, Denver, and Houston. We have an office in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an office in the Philippines with about 7 staff who do data improvement. All our software engineering takes place in our Brisbane City office. Joshua Dill: What problem does your data-management solution solve? Wayne Gerard: I’ll use a practical example. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and Las Vegas Valley Water District have been building water infrastructure in southern Nevada as the region’s population has grown over the last 10 years. As a result, they have hundreds of thousands of engineering files that represent what they’ve built, also known as as-built data. These files were not easily accessible or usable. We had been solving this problem for 6 or 7 years when I met the deputy general manager of the SNWA on a trade mission to Australia led by the governor of Nevada. SNWA was after a solution that would allow it to put all its engineering and as-built data in one place and help it organize it, clean it up, and make it easily accessible to staff and third-party contractors. Joshua Dill: So your product is a platform that can be accessed from a variety of PCs or mobile devices. Wayne Gerard: Yes. RedEye is an engineering datamanagement platform for companies that own and operate large, complex, critical infrastructure, including water and power utilities. We provide native cloud and mobile-based
PHOTOS COURTESY OF REDEYE.
Wayne Gerard: I am the CEO of RedEye, which I cofounded in 2012. Prior to that, I was an army officer for 9 years, then worked for a software company that serviced the industrial sector, including utilities, water, mining, and power, during the first tech bubble. I then set up a consulting company in 2005 servicing that same market and an electrical engineering company in 2011. The engineering company worked with the mining industry, and while working onsite at a mining outfit, I was constantly given the wrong set of engineering data. That led me to search for a solution that we could recommend back to the market. We realized that there was no purpose-built engineering data-management solution for large, complex assets like water or power utilities. In 2012, we started to create the first native cloud and mobile solution purpose built to solve the problems we experienced working onsite.
Joshua Dill: Please tell us about RedEye today.
