AI firm takes over maintenance software company

Industrial AI software leader  Uptake has acquired Albuquerque-based Asset Performance Technologies, Inc. (APT) for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition provides Uptake with the world's most comprehensive library of equipment failure modes used for preventive and conditions-based maintenance optimization in 

power

 generation, petrochemical, oil and gas, steel and other industries.

APT's SaaS product, Preventance APM, leverages the company's Asset Strategy Library (ASL), which has failure mode information for nearly 800 equipment types and helps industrial customers implement advanced maintenance strategies. This results in increased operational uptime and plant reliability while reducing operations and maintenance costs. The software dynamically adjusts to changing operating conditions, plant requirements and economic market conditions.

APT's Asset Strategy Library is already the "intel inside" (the brains) for asset performance management products in the market today. Uptake will leverage the ASL to build not just static digital twins but learning digital twins that get better every day. This data supercharges Uptake's industrial asset graph, mapping how subsystems, components and machines across the industrial world relate and work with each other.

"Combining the world's largest library of machine failure data with Uptake's leading industrial AI & IoT products allows us to go deeper and deliver outcomes that matter," said Uptake President Ganesh Bell. "This commitment to provide platform and applications with vertical content makes Uptake the strategic partner of choice to industrial companies as they undergo their digital transformations and liberate themselves from one-sided maintenance contracts."

APT's co-founders, Dr. David Worledge and Glenn Hinchcliffe, began developing condition and environment-specific preventive maintenance information on nuclear plants in the late 1990s for the Electric 

Power

Research Institute (EPRI), the electric utility industry's research arm. That work was the genesis of the ASL.

"Adding AI is the natural next step in the evolution of our technology," said APT CEO Mark Benak. "We look forward to working with Uptake to help our customers achieve new levels of operating efficiency and safely managing risk."

Worledge and Hinchcliffe, along with Benak and APT's other employees, have joined Uptake.

"Even though they produce massive amounts of data, industrial companies often lack key inputs needed to optimize assets and extend their life cycles. Without that, operations struggle to understand what to do and when," said Mike Guilfoyle, director of research and senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group. "By combining deep operational and equipment knowledge with predictive analytics, companies can take a proactive approach to asset management that converts data into business value, reducing capital outlays and leading to efficiencies, safer operations and greater reliability."

APT's customers include ENMAX 

Energy

, the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona, SABIC IP, Suncor 

Energy

 and US Steel.