For asset owners & developers

Own your telemetry. Don't rent it from your RTU vendor.

One instruction to your M&E consultant — given before the telemetry submission drawing is issued — decides whether you own your monitoring for the life of the asset, or lease it from whoever supplied the RTU.

The spec clauses your consultant copies →← Back

The problem you don't see until it's too late

Telemetry submission drawings traditionally carry a line like “RTU shall connect to the monitoring server at IP 1.2.3.4 via VPN.” It looks like a neutral connectivity requirement. It isn't. A fixed IP / VPN endpoint can only be satisfied by the RTU vendor's own monitoring platform — so “comply with the approved drawing” quietly becomes “buy that vendor's platform contract, for the life of the asset.”

The RTU brand and the monitoring platform get bundled. You think you bought a sensor; you actually signed a 10-year platform lease, specified into a drawing you approved without realising it. When that platform is VPN-only, every site is a separate profile, IT security flags the inbound access, and the day you change RTU vendor you lose your history.

The fix is one instruction

“Specify the cloud architecture I want — not the IP address you were told to use.”

Tell the consultant the submission drawing must say:

  1. 1.RTU/PLC transmits via an IoT gateway using an open protocol (Modbus / MQTT / DNP3). No RTU brand mandated.
  2. 2.Outbound cellular only. No fixed public IP, no port-forwarding, no site-to-site VPN.
  3. 3.The platform endpoint is issued by you at commissioning — not drawn as an IP or VPN profile.
  4. 4.The cloud platform is specified by capability: web access without VPN or client software, multi-tier role-based access, ≥12 months trend retention, alarm notification, open export API.

The submittal-grade wording is on the consultants page — they copy-paste it.

Why this is squarely in your interest

Without the instruction
With it
RTU brand + platform bundled — captive pricing
RTU brand competes on hardware alone
VPN / inbound IP — fails IT security review, MPLS cost
Outbound-only — passes review on the first pass
One VPN profile per site, per vendor
One dashboard across every site and vendor
Change RTU vendor → lose history + access
Platform is yours; history and access persist

It does not ban any RTU brand. A Sofrel or Schneider RTU still wins the hardware tender — it just speaks an open protocol to your platform instead of locking you to itsplatform. You break the captive monitoring contract, not the hardware competition. That's what keeps the spec defensible at tender review.

The one sentence to take into the meeting

“Specify the cloud architecture you want, not the IP you're told to use — that's the difference between owning your telemetry and renting it from whoever supplied the RTU.”

Talk to us about your next project →