Geotechnical & Structural monitoring consultancy Specto Technology grew their practice by using Eagle.io to monitor Sound, Air and Vibrations sensors & dataloggers for clients.
"We've grown a lot as a company over the years since we started using Eagle.io. That's really a result of appreciative customers. Because once they see what eagle can do, they wrap more projects and more sensors into it. I'm sure we're giving customers more value for their money.”
Specto Technology is a technical integrator that preconfigures geotechnical, structural & environmental monitoring systems for clients to install as plug and play solutions across the US. Founder Ed Kirby and his team of thirteen serve dozens of clients in Commercial Construction, Structure Management, Site Remediation, Mining and more.
With eagle.io, Specto has been able to keep clients happier. They’ve built analytics and data processing into the eagle.io platform to serve the specific needs of their geotechnical customers, and expanded their market size with eagle’s intuitive dashboards and API integration abilities. Specto has grown in headcount by 650% over the last few years, and Ed says a big part of why was their use of eagle.io.
Keeping up with new clients and technology changes. Servicing dozens of clients with changing needs and evolving technology, Ed told us Specto’s old system became unsustainable and posed a risk to client relationships.
“The software we're using before eagle was called ARGUS, which is an older software that had not been updated and development had stopped. This software was dying and we realized at the time, ‘hey, this is not sustainable.’”
Ed’s team was running into unfixable bugs. As Ed told us “we were finding occasional bugs and it's hard to go to a customer and say ’sorry we're charging you for this but we can't fix it, and this bug will be there forever.'”
This outdated system created team stress and client retention risks. “Knowing that we had to deliver that bad news made us realize we're going to lose customers and if we lose someone on the software platform, we have a chance of losing them through the whole cycle of the project from sensors to data acquisition.”
Their software was blocking Ed and his team from growing. “Because it's pretty old software we realized that it was going to hamper our growth and that our customers are going to grow out of it. What eagle gives us is a platform to grow upon and it lets our customers grow with the technology.”
Ed's team chose Eagle.io because it's a ‘future-proof’ sensor platform. According to Ed, choosing eagle.io enabled them to ‘future proof’ their service offering. He told us instead of being “a little embarrassed about what we could provide, now we can confidently say that this is where you want to be in a few years time”.
Ed and his team have “confidence to offer the full solution knowing that it’s going to be future proof”. As integrators “it's really important to offer eagle because without that sort of software tying everything together, we potentially won't win any of the projects since our customers need a full turn-key solution”.
Eagle.io is a monitoring platform the technical staff at Specto can tweak on the fly, giving them a unique edge. As Ed told us, “having the ability to do calculations and mini programming within eagle makes us very agile because we don't have to rely on an outside developer to build something into the software.”
Eagle’s flexibility, API and data consumption allow Ed and his team to build their IP within the system, adding service layers on top of eagle to become stickier to clients. “Eagle is very good at presenting data and some people want more advanced analytics so what we've done is pull data with the eagle.io API so we can use different software like Tableau to analyze the data and display it in a highly customized report. Every client has their own idea of reporting, and this allows us to satisfy every need when someone has a really specific report they want.”
Eagle.io’s platform has allowed Specto to grow from 2 people in 2016 to 13 people today, whilst improving the value they bring to customers. Thanks to the flexibility of eagle, Ed’s team at Specto has been able to develop IP within the system that adds more value to clients, contributing to account expansion.
Ben, CEO of eagle.io told us “eagle.io has been built to allow integrators and subject matter experts; geotechnical engineers, hydrologists, meteorologists, and environmental scientists to deliver monitoring solutions that fit their customers needs. What I've seen Ed and the Specto team do is build their own IP which they can own, hold on to and value out on top of the platform. Their IP in eagle.io gives them an edge against the competition.”
Eagle.io was built to handle the mundane, but crucial jobs of collecting and storing data, providing tools for real-time analysis, visualisation and alerting. Specto technology have embraced the eagle.io model, and built complex data analysis tools for their customers in the geotechnical market, virtually transforming the eagle.io SaaS software into a completely different service.
One example of Specto-owned analytics, built in eagle.io’s processing and logic engine, allows dynamic selection from one of four air quality sensors, depending on the wind direction. This expansion on eagle.io’s core functions enabled their client, Terraphase Engineering, to monitor and manage construction-dust air contribution to background levels in real-time, whichever way the wind was blowing.
"When the wind turns from North to South, with our program Eagle is smart enough to know the sensor is now downwind. On the fly it can recalculate that, which would take an engineer hours to do, and only after the fact."
Save hours of setup time for new sensor configurations and data flows.“We sometimes have projects with hundreds of survey prisms (Optical Monitoring sensor equipment) and we can inject the data files directly into eagle with the API. We’ve set it up so this configures the sensors/data sources automatically in eagle which saves the customer, or us, hours of work.”
Can serve a broader range of customers Specto can now serve both customers who want everyone done for them with an eagle.io dashboard and those who want to manage the console themselves. “We can reach both levels of customer because with eagle it gives us both options pretty easily”, according to Ed.
Have been able to win more projects with EagleEd told us Eagle’s impressive dashboards allow his sales team to win more deals. “In our industry, there's still a bit of a lag about what people think is possible with data presentation. Often clients are very surprised when we show how easy that is and how good it can look with eagle. So the sales teams like eagle because it looks good, it adds a lot of value and it makes our value proposition easier to sell.
“We've grown a lot as a company over the years since we started using eagle. That's really a result of appreciative customers. Because once they see what eagle can do, they wrap more projects and more sensors into it. I'm sure we're giving customers more value for their money.”
