Keith Flynn is starting 2017 with more optimism than 2016.
The president and founder of RtTech Software, the Moncton-based company specializing in the Industrial Internet of Things, is bursting with good news. The company spent the last year forming partnerships with several international players, and those relationships are turning into sales.
The company’s products are now being used in 28 countries — 11 of them added since the end of 2015. Its client list now ranges from local champions like Irving and McCain Foods to such global powerhouses as Procter & Gamble, even NASA.
About a year ago, things were harder. RtTech and Pablo Asiron, RtTech’s original CEO, had parted ways, and Flynn suddenly found himself running the company. He makes no secret of the fact that it was a difficult adjustment.
“You’ve got an office full of people, people who needed some sort of direction,” he said in an interview last week. “I’ve been working as an entrepreneur since 2002, always on the technical side, and that’s all about execution. To be flipped to the other side, it’s hard.”
It was a change for the company that had become one of the high-flyers of the regional startup community, having just landed $3 million in venture capital funding from McRock Capital and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.
RtTech’s IIoT applications help large industrial companies monitor and make decisions on energy consumption and operations using data captured by sensors installed in the plant’s machinery. Its main products are RtEMIS, which can pinpoint when and where part of a system is using excess energy, and RtDUET, which allows companies to examine specific processes to find the cause of downtime and poor utilization issues.
The company had released a cloud-based product in 2015, but then learned it was difficult to scale the product profitably. So a big part of the work in 2016 was reworking the product so it would meet demand.
The solution was to develop a platform called Cipher, a new piece of infrastructure 100 per cent owned by RtTech on which clients can add IIot applications.
“We actually built this in less than 12 months,” said Flynn. “We have customers coming to us and asking for us to build apps that can run off it. . . . This is the part that will go viral.”
Working with its new partners, including global players like Microsoft and Cisco Systems, the company is getting the product in the hands of end-users around the world. Flynn expects to add clients in more countries soon, including China, Austria, Ghana, and Poland.
The company now has 25 employees and its sales effort is focused on using its partnerships to reach large industrial companies. The goal is to help these companies connect their “assets” — that is, bring the power of digital technologies to machinery or other objects to improve their efficiency.
“What’s the highlight of 2017? RtTech is going to help customers connect more assets than ever before," said Flynn. “2017 will be all about connecting more assets.”
