Chemical Companies Embracing New Concepts Like Software PluS Services

We sponsored a CIO Magazine virtual conference called “The Intelligent Enterprise” back in November.  The live event was broadcast on November 12th, but you can access all the content through May 15, 2009 (you need to register to view it).

The conference was built around a number of topics including business intelligence, enterprise applications, software plus services, sustainable computing, and virtualization.

John Schlitt from Nalco joined us for a session to talk about how Nalco is using the Software Plus Services model to deliver better services for its customers.

Nalco, is a leading water treatment and process improvement company, and while chemicals are critical to their success, services are their true differentiator.

Nalco collects a lot of operational data for its customers as part of the service.  However, they didn’t have an optimized way of looking at trends and analyzing data across similar facilities for customers across the globe.  Having this data, with experts analyzing it at a central location, opens up all kinds of new value they can deliver to their customers.

So, why is this solution considered Software Plus Services?  The data collection and analysis piece is delivered as a service to its users.  The users can decide whether they want to access the data simply through a web browser, or use an application like Microsoft Excel for deeper analysis and offline capabilities.

From a customer business standpoint, Nalco can offer more value-added services than before.  And from an customer IT perspective, they can do this without having to impose a lot of infrastructure to support the solution.

Pretty cool…check out the session Software Plus Services session at the above link for more information.

If you are interested in the technology stack, OSIsoft will handle the real-time data collection while Microsoft will provide the business intelligence capabilities and SharePoint/Office will be used for collaboration and presentation for the users. 

I’m sure the team is already thinking of this, but you can imagine where this solution can go.  How simple would it be to drop in unified communications, and now have your experts more easily accessible when they are needed?  And performance management, to start to model trends, comparisons, and variants?

The platform is in place.  What a great innovation story from Nalco!