I’m gratified to lead a startup providing an impactful software solution to industrial companies. I’m even more gratified when that solution gets noticed and oure company gains momentum.

The most recent evidence of Element’s momentum -- scaling to reach more companies with our solution -- is the hiring of our first EVP Sales. The indicators of our ramp can be found beyond that, however.

The news: we’ve hired Stephen Walsh as our first Executive Vice President of Sales. Stephen brings deep experience in the industrial sector, ranging from infrastructure to analytics. He’s held executive-level sales positions at companies such as Oracle, where he was VP of Enterprise Applications for over 10 years. Stephen has also worked for two startups where he led sales efforts for products related to analytics, machine learning, business process control and transaction monitoring. We’re thrilled to have someone of Stephen’s experience on our team and believe his hiring demonstrates the promise of the Element Platform and Element as a company.

Reporting to Stephen is another new hire, Jonathan Skelding, who is our first Head of Strategic Partnerships. For the past six years, Jonathan held executive-level positions at GE Digital and ServiceMax (acquired by GE Digital), most recently as VP of ISV and Technology Alliances. The hiring of Stephen and Jonathan represent big steps forward in delivering our solution more broadly.

We are scaling in ways that go beyond sales and partnerships:

• We’ve expanded the Element Professional Services team that delivers the Element Platform to customers, particularly in the Gulf Coast region.
• We’ve grown our engineering team and are looking to do more. If you have experience developing industrial software or a big data solution, please contact us.
• We’ve moved into a larger office space with room to grow, only steps from our former office!

We’re making these moves after seeing evidence of the Element Platform’s power. Here are just two recent examples:

• An oil and gas super major is using the Element Platform to integrate data from more than 1.5 million sensor streams and more than 6,000 data sources. The company was then able to build 1,600 data models encompassing some 2 billion individual data points annually. This work was completed ten times faster than when using previous methods because of the use of the Element Platform, unlocking dozens of analytical use cases for reliability and process engineers and maintenance personnel in this company’s journey to improve production and reduce incidents.
• After more than seven years of frustration, another oil and gas super major used the Element Platform to develop a data-driven assessment of why one of its refinery stripper columns was overheating, resulting in shutdowns that reduced plant revenue. Using the Element Platform to integrate and prepare data from multiple sources enabled technologists to rule out previous theories for the overheating and, ultimately, led to the actual cause, improving uptime and revenue.

"We’re excited to be moving closer to our ultimate goal of giving every industrial company the ability to quickly and efficiently drive insights from operational data."

- Andy Bane

Overall, we’re excited to be moving closer to our ultimate goal of giving every industrial company the ability to quickly and efficiently drive insights from operational data. When data is transformed into an asset, any aspect of an operation – efficiency, profitability, worker safety and environmental stewardship, to name a few – can be precisely evaluated and ultimately improved.

We look forward to helping more customers solve their most pressing challenges by leveraging their own data in new and innovative ways. We believe that any aspect of an industrial business that can benefit from the wise use of data can benefit from the use of the Element Platform.