For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed Iron-IQ’s CEO (Michael Ligrani), Chairman (Matt Showalter), and Chief Revenue Officer (Josh Spraker) about how the company is enabling the energy industry to minimize the cost of building and maintaining monitoring and control systems while also automating workflows to maximize efficiency. Iron-IQ is a cloud-native industrial internet of things (IIoT) supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform that allows energy companies to remotely monitor and control devices from anywhere in the world. Iron-IQ provides a complete turnkey solution that replaces legacy on-premise SCADA systems. For more information on Iron-IQ, please visit www.iron-iq.com.

Background: In 2019, after spending most of his career focused on implementing and maintaining SCADA systems in the energy industry, Michael Ligrani merged his company, ATLAS SCADA Systems, with Drillbox, a data platform with a mobile app serving the energy industry that was owned by Matt Showalter, a petroleum engineer that spent the previous 15+ years in the software sector. The combined businesses were rebranded as Iron-IQ.

Value Proposition: While SCADA is hardly a novel technology in the energy industry, Iron-IQ’s cloud-based, enterprise SCADA solution offers the following benefits over legacy on-premise SCADA systems and other cloud-based solutions:

Minimizes OPEX and Eliminates CAPEX: In lieu of the substantial, consistent overhead expenses associated with maintaining the software and network equipment that is required by legacy on-premise SCADA systems (whether just a few or thousands of locations), Iron-IQ charges an affordable fixed subscription fee. Further, Iron-IQ’s solution provides a lower-cost entry point for the deployment of SCADA, as customers are no longer required to commit to a large capital outlay to purchase and implement SCADA equipment and can alternatively lease.
Facilitates Access to Information: Iron-IQ’s cloud-native platform enables anyone in the organization as well as approved third parties to access the data and information from the SCADA systems. Additionally, permissions and dashboards can be customized based on specific user roles, which allows the most pertinent information to be communicated in the most efficient manner across teams.
Highly Scalable: Instead of just adding remote access capabilities to legacy SCADA systems and still requiring an in-house SCADA management team, Iron-IQ replaces that in-house team, enabling it to serve any customer, no matter the size. Since Iron-IQ’s subscription fee is charged by location, it is also easy to scale to each enterprise’s unique needs. Additionally, Iron-IQ’s platform is an open ecosystem that facilitates the implementation and use of specific apps/functions, such as production optimization for artificially lifted wells.
Enhances Security: Given cloud-native platforms are held to a higher security standard due to being widely adopted in numerous critical industries, they are inherently more secure than legacy on-premise systems while also being easier and faster to roll out security updates.

Closing Thoughts: With efficiency gains of utmost importance to management teams in the energy industry, it is exciting to see solutions like Iron-IQ’s being adopted by companies in their quest to become leaner and nimbler. We look forward to following Iron-IQ, as they continue to help the upstream and midstream energy industry while also planning to expand into the water, renewables, and physical security applications.

Company Spotlights

July 2021