Brazilian water firm Iguá bets on public cloud, smart meters to enhance operations

Amid its strong expansion, Brazilian water and sanitation group Iguá Saneamento is increasing investments in digital and automation tools to scale its back-office and front-office operations, focusing on digital apps, smart metering and public cloud migration.

“Our strategy is to consolidate all our cloud workloads on AWS,” Iguá’s maintenance supervisor, Gustavo Coelho, told BNamericas.

Currently, the company also uses cloud solutions based on Microsoft Azure and Oracle, but the strategy beyond these systems is to concentrate the cloud platforms on AWS.

Part of this will come as "tied-up" contract signed with software company SAP, within the Rise with SAP suite, to run it on AWS cloud.

The use of public cloud services is considered crucial for Iguá not only to launch new services but also to facilitate the integration of different databases, both of users and acquired companies.

“Since I'm still on a growth curve in sanitation, I think there will probably be a lot of auctions in the next two years and I will have to grow very quickly. Our strategy should be based on cloud services for a long time,” said Coelho, after being asked about the hybrid or multi-cloud approaches.

Iguá still has legacy servers and internal processing rooms, but it is advancing with the decommissioning of its datacenters, said the executive.

The company's ERP software is SAP's S/4 Hana which, for now, runs on a private cloud.

The go-live of the solution took place after a year and eight months of work, much of which was done during the pandemic, and having local company Megawork as integrator.

Before migrating to the new version of SAP, Iguá used SAP's ECC software and, before that, the ERP Proteus, developed by Brazilian company Totvs.

INNOVATION FRONTS

Among other digitization fronts targeted by the company are the expansion of smart metering, partnerships with startups, and new features for its Digi Iguá app.

Currently, 40% of the water is measured by smart meters, and it is the result of the creation of a spin-off business unit focused on IoT called Fluxx.

The equipment for the smart meters is provided by a Chinese company and the current park exceeds 30,000 devices. The goal is to reach 300,000, said Coelho.

Iguá is also betting on startups. In 2018, it launched its Iguá Lab, an open innovation hub to foster relationships with early-stage tech firms.

The company reports having had interactions with more than 1,100 startups and over 85 solutions tested. Around 45 startups have been hired to provide services to the company.

Iguá invested 144min reais (US$26.1mn) in Q2, an increase of 24.0% compared to the same period last year, and 321mn reais in H1, up 48.4% year-on-year.