Myriota, a smallsat Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity company based in South Australia, has teamed  with cloud-based environmental platform Eagle.io with the aim of preserving global water supplies.

The partnership, which was announced at the 2019 IoT World Conference in California, will provide global software and telemetry solutions for water management issues faced by agricultural players and governments worldwide.

Myriota's Dr. Alex Grant and Dr. David Haley at their office in Lot Fourteen in Adelaide, South Australia. Photo is courtesy of Rosina Possingham.

Myriota CEO Dr. Alex Grant said the partnership would integrate Eagle.io’s cloud-based IoT platform that manages alerts from more than 100,000 environmental sensors with Myriota’s secure, low-cost, low-power satellite connectivity. This will allow the agricultural sector to increase the accuracy of its water measurements through regular, automated recordings.

“We can’t manage what we can’t measure,” he said. “So, if Australia or other countries want to effectively manage their water resources for the future, we need to be getting much better at understanding those resources and how we’re using them and how they’re being replenished and how we’re basically interacting with our environment. And that’s proven difficult and expensive to do, so it doesn’t get done in a lot of cases and that’s when we end up with situations like we are in Australia at the moment.”

The two companies will work with third party data logger manufacturer MIoT, with Myriota integrating its module into their Captis product line and Eagle.io building a feature that will allow device configuration and management for the Captis from within their application.

Eagle.io CEO Ben Starr said at the moment water meter data is manually and infrequently collected but the partnership Myriota will improve the capability of non-urban water meters and end manual collection.

Story by Jessica Bassano, The Lead South Australia