One of the first speakers at the IoT Festival being held 4 June at the Melbourne Park Function Centre will be Sundar Iyer, general manager products and marketing with Melbourne based IoT company, Freestyle Technology.

He’ll be recounting how this Aussie company is making waves in the smart metering market in South Korea, where it installed a smart metering system covering more than 24,000 water users in Gochang County.

Freestyle Technology, founded in 2006, was an early mover in the IoT market. It has developed a fairly generic IoT solution that has been designed to integrate into any IoT device and be communications agnostic. However, 90 percent of its business is overseas and the bulk of this in smart metering in South East Asia.

Iyer told IoT Hub: “We’ve quite deliberately taken our key core patents around interoperability, two–way IoT and distributed intelligence and focussed on the utilities sector, predominantly in Asia.”

He listed these core patents as covering: the ability to control and monitor any type of metering devices and a range of sensors, to provide both monitoring and control over any kind of network; and the Freestyle Microengine (FME), “a runtime environment that allows you to deploy different applications at the edge to operate the installation in a safe and secure way, and with a variant that runs in the cloud.”

Iyer said that, out of the 500 IoT platforms on the market, Freestyle’s was one of only a handful had the ability to interoperate across any network and any device, support both monitoring and control of IoT devices and be deployed at the edge or in the cloud.

“Of those focussing on the utilities market in Asia there is practically only us,” he said. “That is why we have been laser focussed on this market niche and why we have been able to get significant success in South Korea were we have the largest deployments of smart water meters, and in Taiwan where we have the largest deployments of smart gas meters.”

Iyer said Korea and Taiwan had led the move to smart metering in the region, but many other nations were now catching up, including Australia, and Freestyle is now leveraging its track record overseas to break into the Australian smart metering market.

“We have secured a contract with a major gas company in Australia, and we are seeing a lot of interest in multiple market verticals,” Iyer said.

“A lot of water utilities are very interested in using smart metering to detect leaks. In Gochang within a quarter of our solution going live we were able to reduce leakage rates by 19 percent They worked that out to be worth about $A2 million in annual savings.”

While the company will keep its focus on the utility market, Iyer said it was open to other opportunities. “Our capabilities are fairly portable across market niches so we are certainly open to exploring others. Utilities get us into buildings and into cities and gives us access to some adjacencies we can explore, but for the moment we are focussed on smart utility metering, which is a massive segment.