With the newer devices, Freedman explains that “all the thinking is done in the cloud, very little in the field.” CTS technicians spend far less time driving around visiting physical devices, and can now service more devices remotely from their IoT-enabled smartphones. This allows them to serve more customers in a given day. The team is 50 percent more productive than it was just two years ago, before IoT. “This is a huge bonus to a small business like ours, especially in Australia, where wages are high by world standards,” says Freedman.

Shifting to the IoT serverless environment and the new smart devices has triggered a critical change in CTS’s cost structure, as the IoT-enabled devices are much less expensive than their predecessors. Because the capital expense of hardware typically limits a customer’s ability to engage with CTS, using devices that are two-thirds as expensive as their predecessors has really expanded CTS’s reach. With the less costly, simpler systems in place, management can now confidently approach smaller councils and agricultural customers, who were previously hesitant to consider CTS’s services due to time and budget constraints.

AWS IoT is a managed service, which means CTS can focus on innovation instead of managing servers or infrastructure. Less than a year ago, the company released what it envisions as its future flagship product—Field Mouse. When it first launched, Field Mouse’s purpose was to allow multiple users to concurrently control field lighting systems. It has since been expanded to water-management applications and operation of security gates, and it is also being used to enable overarching control of legacy hardware from different manufacturers.

Training time has gone from six hours to one, because the devices and their controls are “simply more intuitive,” Freedman says. This improved efficiency and speed have finally given Freedman and his team the opportunity to promote their business. They are currently in talks with commercial parties interested in using their technology for large-scale property developments.

Enhanced security features in the IoT environment have been a major selling point in discussions with new clients. The extra encryption and mutual authentication associated with each connected IoT device give CTS’s public-sector customers confidence in the solutions they purchase. Security is particularly important to the local councils, as the monitoring and control systems access aspects of city and state infrastructure that could be vulnerable to outside threats. The Australian government also strictly oversees local agencies to ensure proper security protocols are in place.

“Working with AWS has changed our business,” Freedman says. “It shines a light on new technology and ways of working that we may have eventually discovered on our own, but we would have been so far behind the competition that we would be struggling to keep up.”