Recently, Laing O’Rourke developed a prototype camera which uses artificial intelligence to detect if workers are wearing protective clothing in hazardous areas, with other technology initiatives including using big data to test the hardening of newly-laid road surfaces.
Nutanix says it is supporting Laing O’Rourke to further develop similar technologies by providing its enterprise cloud OS software to run Laing O’Rourke’s core applications.
“We believe in the benefits of building twice, once digitally and once in the real world, and Nutanix helps us to achieve this,” said James Fields, head of IT Infrastructure and Operations, Laing O’Rourke Australia.
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“We use data to optimise and analyse our opportunities, supply chain and projects to ensure that we deliver value for our clients, while continuing to lead the way in innovation in construction and engineering.”
The enterprise cloud environment is being rolled out by Nutanix and partner MOQdigital and hosted in the NEXTDC S1 and NEXTDC B2 colocation data centres in Sydney and Brisbane.
Fields says Laing O’Rourke had also considered public cloud, “but realised they could do it cheaper and more securely over a five year period on premise, additionally public could presented difficult cost forecasting and could mean its IT team spent too much time balancing the books rather than developing new digital services".
He also says Laing O’Rourke chose Nutanix to maximise resources and because it offered an overall better return on investment, as well as simplicity and improved security by enabling faster and more regular patching when compared to other vendor offerings.
“Laing O’Rourke has shown the rest of the industry that the status quo is not an option.” said Neville Vincent, vice-president ANZ, ASEAN and India, Nutanix.
“As the construction industry in Australia continues to transform, cloud technologies will become vital to securing a long-term profitable, productive and sustainable future. The future (continued) success of Australia’s construction industry will rely upon using the simplest, most effective and most flexible solutions out there – and they all emanate in the cloud.
“As increasing productivity, cost efficiencies, greater competition, rising customer sophistication and health and safety all make increasing demands on the industry, the requirement on businesses to re-think their IT and technology strategies to keep pace is only set to grow.”
