MESOTHELIOMA

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.


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


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.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/tired-of-losing-your-oil-derricks-16129/