National Petroleum News (NPN) has been the independent voice of the petroleum industry since 1909 as the opposition to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. So, motor fuels marketing and retail is not just a sideline for us, it’s our core competency.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/193494
Marketing & Supply By KeithReid A cloud-based, hardware-enabled, software solution for fueling facilities New Vendor Profile: MyTankInfo A new player has arrived, looking to provide cloudbased and mobile fuel management capabilities to the tank operator. Olathe, Kan.-based 4thRight Technologies markets MyTankInfo www.mytankinfo.com, a cloud-based, hardware-enabled, software solution that meets the fueling facility needs of the commercial and retail petroleum marketplace. As the company states: MyTankInfo helps improve fuel margins, increase efficiency and reduce risk all for less than $2/day. An early adopter is Southern Petroleum Inc., with fueling facilities throughout 14 OCTOBER 2013 Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee. We talked to industry veteran John Nesbit, vice president of sales and marketing at 4thRight Technologies, about his new venture. NPN: What sets you apart from the competition? Nesbit: Most of the software solutions reach into gasoline stations using what is called a polling engine. What happens with a polling scenario is a server reaches out, gets the data from one site, and then moves down the line to the rest of the sites. The problem is that is basically serial communications and you can only do one site at a time. And if you miss a site, it has to go back and do it again. That creates a lot of delay in the data. In a retail fueling facility, any data that is over an hour old is almost un-actionable. For some of the larger marketers, they are only getting one or perhaps two polls per day. That is great as long as the marketer can act on the data within the hour they receive it; otherwise it is stale and there is not a lot you can do with it. And if you are using IP then you have to have a VPN set up and hardware at the site and in some case you are poking holes in the firewall, which can create a security issue or impact PCI compliance. What we have is this very small piece of hardware that sits at the site and one side of it connects to the tank gauge and the other side connects into the Internet router. And what makes us so different is that that little device will look at the tank gauge and at least once an hour collects data for the inventory information and pushes it to our cloud server. The beauty of that design is its push rather than pull, and we can have 1,000 sites hit that server simultaneous. Because it's pushing it, there's no VPN, there's no firewall issues and the little box that can be self-installed by the marketer and it does all of the IT work for them so there is no IT guy. We also do compliance and we do reconciliation – the daily over and short report – which is a federally mandated requirement. NPN: What do you think the state of cloud technology is today, overall, as a mechanism to host and facilitate business solution? Nesbit: It seems to be getting stronger every day. We are very proud of our methodology because of the savings in infrastructure eliminating the server in the software purchases of the backups and redundancies, and you still have what is, relatively, a locally deployed solution. The beauty of cloud technology is that you put that entire NPN Magazine n www.npnweb.com