With multiple challenges escalating around the globe, from Covid-19 to environmental issue, Xylem is committed to safeguarding water resources in the region through their latest innovations.
Frank Ackland, Managing Director of Xylem – Middle East and Turkey, goes further in details around Xylem in an exclusive interview with Energy Review MENA magazine.
Can you outline to us what are the latest of Xylem's leading technologies and innovative products?
Our solutions and services at Xylem move, treat, analyse, monitor and return water to the environment in public utility, industrial, residential and commercial building services settings. We also provide a leading portfolio of smart metering, network technologies and advanced infrastructure analytics solutions for water, electric and gas utilities. To cater to the Middle East and Turkey market, our regional headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
At Xylem, we understand that in order for utilities to best utilise our technical and financial resources, we need to be able to take informed engineering decisions. This requires utilities to generate actionable data that is both accurate and reliable. Over the previous few years, Xylem have made several acquisitions to help grow our offering to utilities in order to improve efficiencies and ultimately drive the sector forward. Some of these include Visenti, EmNet, Valor Water and Citilogics (amongst others).
In a challenging environment in the MENA region, how is Xylem helping companies implement new technologies and develop in their fields?
The Middle East is one of the world's most water-scarce regions. The growing water demand and supply shortage is one of the biggest challenges for water utility companies and a threat to the region's socio-economic development.
That’s why we, at Xylem, are committed to safeguarding water resources in the region through innovation, and we help utility companies by providing our smart water metering solutions that move, treat, and monitor water sustainably, ensuring an undisrupted supply with minimum water loss. We ultimately offer a complete end-to-end solution, so that we can act as a single point of contact to help provide not only treatment and pumping solutions, but also monitoring and data analysis solutions. Under the “One Xylem” approach, we are able to seamlessly and easily integrate different data types and sources into the monitoring and assessment platforms.
To further support the MENA region, and our customer here, we are also offering pumping rental and services. We have offices in UAE, Oman, and KSA, and we offer temporary and long-term rental solutions to provide access to thousands of Xylem rental products capable of helping project sites save unusable water throughout the construction of the project.
What is the added value that your advanced infrastructure analytics solutions for water, electric and gas utilities bring to your clients?
Xylem is a multi-faceted company in which we can draw upon solutions, sensors, pumps and treatment from other parts of the Xylem portfolio. Having this capability enables us to offer solutions from source to tap and back to the source. Thus, Xylem can help solve water not just from a network efficiency point of view but across the entire water network cycle. In addition, Xylem continues to innovate with new ideas across a wide range of products and solutions to constantly improve the ROI of sensors, equipment and software solutions.
Along with the solutions Xylem offers, security measures are also taken into consideration. What differentiate the company’s cybersecurity measures from other industry competitors?
At Xylem we recognize the risks that arise in today's smart and highly connected world. That is why our solutions are predominantly cloud-based, and have the highest standards of cybersecurity. We are also proud member of the international security network for the water sector - Water Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (ISAC).
When it comes to ensuring our customer's confidentiality, we take a proactive approach where our engineering, development and cybersecurity teams are always on the lookout to identify and eradicate any vulnerabilities and threats. We also have risk-based security design solutions in place to secure our customer's information and infrastructure in the face of any cyber threat.
The pandemic we’re witnessing has been a setback for some companies. As Xylem, what are the steps you took or planning on taking in order to overcome this challenge?
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, our priority has been the safety and wellbeing of our people, our customers, and our communities. Xylem’s digital solutions enable our employees to connect from anywhere and not be restricted to having to work from the office. This flexibility enables operators through to managers to work remotely without a decrease in operational efficiency.
When it comes to our employees serving communities physically, by keeping utility operations running, we are doing all we can to keep them safe and healthy through Xylem’s Pandemic Risk Mitigation Plan. Under the plan, we educate employees on infection control and social distancing, supply them with all the necessary PPE equipment at work and offer them financial and medical support at this challenging time.
As water and utility operators, we are uniquely positioned to guide our communities on sustainable water usage as our water resources are exhausted during this pandemic. So, we are running online education and certification courses to close critical knowledge gaps and ensure that water - our most precious resource at this time - is not wasted.
In addition, through our CSR program, Watermark, we have donated water technology equipment to hospitals in construction, and we are also getting our employees involved in the provision of critical services and spreading the WASH education program with their communities.
