Following the acquisition last year of industrial IoT providers Aqura Technologies and Alliance Automation, Telstra today announced that it has launched a new end-to-end industrial automation capability.

Industries targeted by the new service offering include mining, construction, supply chain and manufacturing, which the group executive of Telstra Enterprise, David Burns, said face complex changes.

“Our ambition is to work hand-in-hand with businesses to help solve their biggest problems – complex issues like siloed IT and OT systems, heightened cyber security risks, environmental management, technical skills shortages, and managing legacy systems,” Mr Burns said.

Mr Burns said over the years Telstra has built a "holistic ecosystem of highly specialised industrial automation capabilities."

On top of the two IoT companies acquired last year, the suite of services, under the auspices of Telstra Purple, include the telcos fibre, IoT and 5G networks, and the Quantium-Telstra joint venture for data science and artificial intelligence.

Telstra pointed to energy distributor Jemena as customer that has benefited from the industrial automation capability.

In partnership with Telstra Purple and Nucleus3, Jemena implemented an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy to read hard to reach meters in high rises.

The deployment lead to increased visibility, efficiency, less manual work and more accurate bills for customers and Jemena intends to complete transition for around 5000 units with 200,000 subscribers, capturing the data on its Cumulocity platform.

Burns said that another big opportunity for Telstra lies in increasing the safety of workers in Australia's heavy industries.

"For example, we’ve been working with Newcrest and Ericsson to trial underground private 4G and 5G networks at their Cadia gold mine – one of the largest gold operations in Australia - on the back of the fully operational above-ground 4G network.”

“This can enable high-bandwidth, low-latency communications essential for the next generation of mining automation, including new networks of sensors monitoring everything from air quality to structural movement, and ultimately protecting Newcrest’s biggest asset – its people,” Burns said.