Event
Summary
iVita Corporation put the final wraps on its Commander 3.0 software and
announced the general availability of its asset information management
system. It has also announced a partnership with PinPoint Corporation.
The partnership with PinPoint fulfills another piece of the dream (see
iVita Mines Assets for Bottom Line Health). PinPoint is currently
strong in health-care, one of iVita's key verticals, where manufacturers
use its wireless tags to track manufacturing process flow and other customers
use it to track the location of assets in warehouses and storage areas.
Version
3.0 was released fairly soon after version 2.0, because the company has
adopted what they call a flexible approach to architecture for the purpose
of being responsive to customer suggestions.
The
Commander 3.0 software, hosted through DataReturn, sports a Microsoft-style
look, as shown in Figure 1. This screen shows a manager the assets of
one fictitious company, Reliable Energy. The assets are tracked in two
folders as shown in the right-hand pane.
Figure
1.
The
lower part of the screen is reserved for various kinds of messages. Here,
an alert has been posted notifying the manager that a waterblaster (an
asset worth approximately $100,000, not an industrial-sized version the
neon colored water rifles that kids love) has been idle for more than
the accepted time as defined by Reliable.
Additional
features soon to be announced are exemplified by the following Figures,
which represent a preliminary version of the forthcoming screen designs,
made available to TEC by iVita. Figure 2 shows a more complex situation
than Figure 1. Reliable has acquired Star Energy. In merging assets of
the two companies the software has detected that there is now a need for
another water blaster. This need would have been determined in one of
a few ways. It might be an outstanding request from Star. Or it could
be triggered by some rule that Reliable has developed, such as that for
every eight widgets there must be at least one water blaster. Notice that
the message window also contains news about items that have been submitted
for bid and disposal on iVita's energy marketplace partner
Figure
2.
In
Figure 3 we see that the software will detect both problems and solutions.
It has detected that one side of the operation has a surplus item - surplus
because of the number of days it has been inactive - that could be deployed
to a different division.
Figure
3.
Market
Impact
We expect that iVita will develop a considerable following fairly quickly
now that the product has gone into general availability The company is
beginning to expand its sales force and has already seen substantial interest
in its product from large enterprises.
While
without any look-alike competitors, iVita is not alone. There are established
companies that specialize in asset management, some of which are making
their own connections to trading exchanges to make disposal of unneeded
assets more convenient. (See Peregrine
Polishes the Old In-Out-and-In-between). Other new ventures are attempting
to add value to the disposal process itself. (See Antidisintermediation).
In
the long run, therefore, iVita can expect to see various kinds of competition.
However, at the moment it has a good chance to both define the market
and build a strong customer base.
Given
iVita's range of target verticals, we suspect that announcements will
be forthcoming with other vendors of wireless tracking systems.
User
Recommendations
The companies with the most to gain are those with large numbers of assets
or large numbers of asset-using locations. Such companies would do well
to contact iVita for an ROI analysis. Pricing of the product is fairly
low - a few dollars per month for each employee in a company or division.
Pricing per employee was chosen to make it easy for companies, once having
taken the plunge with iVita, to decide to expand its use. Since the product
is hosted and browser-based, integration costs may prove to be fairly
small; that could make for a persuasive ROI argument even if only one
water blaster purchase is saved.