Peter Crowther Updates Us On His First Year As Powelectrics CTO
Peter Crowther is an IT architect, developer and trouble-shooter, with over 30 years’ experience working with Microsoft, GE, Nova Chemicals, GSK and various universities. We asked him to share his thoughts on his first anniversary as Powelectrics CTO.
“In some ways, it feels like I’ve only been here a few months: the work is full-on and there’s a lot of development to do. Everyone has opened up much more to remote activities due to Covid – remote working, but also remote monitoring and, especially, remote condition monitoring so that you don’t have to send people out to sites during a lockdown.
Industrial Internet of Things is ever more relevant to combat cost of living issues. With energy bills and raw material pricing eating into margins, we’re finding that people are actively seeking new solutions to help reduce costs and improve productivity. PowTechnology can help!
That means we’ve got new kinds of enquiries. We’re often putting together new solutions, integrating systems from a variety of vendors, sprinkling our own magic over the result and giving extra value to our customers. Our development team has tripled over the past year as we do more custom development and integration work!
In other ways, it feels like I’ve been here forever! The Powelectrics team is wonderful to work with. They have coped admirably with my rather unusual ways of working on occasion, although MD, Dave Oakes, hasn’t taken up the offer of some of my hair yet! Perhaps next year?
One research project I worked on had the strapline “Making the impossible very difficult”. New IIOT approaches keep appearing, which help to make the previously infeasible into a solution that is user-friendly and cost-effective to implement.
We’ve also moved from simple remote monitoring towards far more discerning systems, for example, alerting customers only when there are situations that need their attention. Under the banner ‘Metron Intelligence’ we have created a broad and rapidly expanding set of integrated digital transformation technologies to achieve customers goals, whether that is a one-off or off-the-shelf system or a fully-customised, application-specific connectivity solution, managing a global estate of assets.
As CTO, I enjoy being at the forefront of these new technologies, but the biggest joy is from seeing people who are comfortable using what we produce and aiding their digital transformation, so they can do things they couldn’t do previously. I want to keep developing IIOT solutions that are fun for the development team, useful to our customers and practical for their end users.”
Dave Oakes, Powelectrics MD added “I have known Peter for many years as a developer and long respected his work. Since joining us as CTO, he has made astute choices in enhancing the team, tripling its size. He has also been pivotal in expanding the range of digital transformation technologies that form ‘Metron Intelligence’. Growing our in-house development resource is key to providing an agile response to evolving customer IIoT needs. It has enabled Powelectrics to create reliable, cost-effective, bespoke solutions.
Peter’s team has brought solution proofs of concept to market in just a few months, enabling our customers to offer unique added-value to their own customer base, at a time of extreme commercial challenge. Thank you to Peter and his team for their hard work and I look forward to the next evolutions in our Industry 4.0 offering.”
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