Titan Cloud Software
Fueling Profits in the Petroleum Industry with IoT Device Monitoring, Advanced

Internet of things (IoT)— where consumer devices, industrial equipment, and people are connected via ubiquitous sensors through the cloud to improve both businesses and peoples’ lives —has evolved to become not just a new term of art, but a critical strategy in the growth of today’s high-performing organizations. The global gas and oil industry has been among the slower sectors to adopt cloud and IoT technology, but times are changing. Today, savvy directors of retail and commercial fuel operations understand the value of IoT in an industry where equipment drives such a large part of both business value and business risk. Leading the segment in developing and deploying these solutions is Brentwood, Tennessee-based Titan Cloud Software.

Launched in 2012, Titan’s IoT and cloud solutions have been very successful in reducing costs and helping environmental and fuel managers at the largest retailers better manage growing environmental risks and tightening fuel margins. With a loyal client base that reads more like a who's who of the industry, these business leaders work hand-in-hand with Titan in the development of analytics, algorithms, and high-definition IoT solutions that integrate devices and add tremendous value. “Our aspiration to connect the industry with intelligent cloud solutions that make downstream fuel management less risky and more profitable has quickly become a reality,” commented David Freese, CEO of Titan Cloud Software.

IoT by the Numbers

Numerically, the complexity of the industry is evident, if not staggering. The firm monitors and manages the fuel systems at tens of thousands of U.S. locations, each having numerous underground and above ground tanks with up to 100 equipment sensors. In total, Titan Cloud Software estimates that it currently monitors 1.53 million sensors each day, some as frequently as down to the sub-second. Building this caliber of software took forethought and planning, as well as faith in the expectation that cloud and IoT was a wave of the future that Titan was uniquely equipped to ride.

“We architected our SaaS platform at launch to accommodate IoT flexibility, including a meta-data layer that describes equipment in terms of type, and protocol and results-parsing that keeps our platform open and agnostic to equipment,” continued Freese. “This includes an advanced multi-threaded M2M (machine-to-machine) SCADA engine than ensures both lightning speed and rock-solid reliability in communicating with these devices in their native machine languages.”

Best-Practice Workflow

Beyond monitoring this enormous quantity and diversity of sensors, Titan has carefully entwined its cloud solutions with smart business processes to ensure this ‘big data’ doesn’t overwhelm their clients. Therefore, what begins with alerts, alarms, or events, always ends with tasks, activities, and documented resolution of issues, as well as the ability to perform root-cause analysis. According to Freese, this accomplishes the core of what good software is supposed to do, namely, “to make the complex simple to manage while helping improve your business process” For Titan, this simplicity includes filtering mass amounts of data into simple, actionable dashboards that allow management by exception, coupled with a workflow that incorporates industry best-practices.

New Segments, New Opportunities, New Growth

This year, the firm introduced CloudConnect, a program that allows other technology companies, service providers, and equipment manufacturers to leverage the cloud and gain the benefits of Titan’s advanced IoT capabilities. In addition, the tides of opportunity are flowing both upstream into the fuel terminal, pipeline, and storage markets, and also across-stream to adjacent segments that share the compliance and monitoring complexities of the fuel industry. One of these sectors is heath care, where numerous sensors must be monitored, complex compliance requirements managed, and compliance issues pro-actively resolved for the sake of both revenue recognition and risk management. In fact, in early 2015, Titan is expected to announce a significant partnership with one of the nation’s largest health care providers, who are currently uncovering tremendous value in the breadth and sophistication of the solutions the company has built in the fuel industry.