Lindsay Corporation drives sustainability and innovation initiatives with Microsoft Azure

Founded in 1955, Lindsay Corporation has a global footprint and a growing suite of products designed to increase safety of infrastructure, reduce waste, and increase agricultural output. These include road safety infrastructure and agricultural irrigation, as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) systems that help customers achieve peak performance levels from their hardware. 

According to GlobalAgriculture.org, agriculture uses around 70 percent of the world’s fresh water¹, which is already a significant proportion of the total, while demand is expected to increase another 19 percent by 2050. However, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, only 10 percent more water will be available for agriculture over the same timeframe². This is just one of many challenges facing urban and rural planners in all corners of the world. 

To meet these challenges, Lindsay specializes in providing products and services that are robust, innovative, and flexible—the kind of solutions that enable markets to evolve and improve.

“As a planet, we’re going to have to produce more with the same, maybe fewer, resources,” says Kurtis Charling, Director of Software Development at Lindsay. “We take a lot of pride in being good stewards of water by creating products and services that increase sustainability around the world.”

In 2019, Charling kicked off a comprehensive initiative to shift the company’s IT operations from a private data center to a more flexible, scalable, and secure cloud solution. Looking for innovative technology to help drive this change, Charling’s team conducted an in-depth evaluation of Microsoft Azure. They saw a huge opportunity in the Azure platform and solutions such as Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge – not just from a data-crunching perspective, but also the technology’s potential to expand and improve Lindsay’s product suite. 

Collaborating with a tech innovator

“We evaluated numerous options, but we ultimately chose Azure for three reasons,” says Charling. “First, we viewed it as the best solution for our offering. Our products are heavily focused on IoT, which ties into number two: we loved the Azure IoT capabilities and focus. Last, but not least, the people at Microsoft were really responsive and easy to work with throughout the whole process.”

Lindsay’s SaaS offering is evolving all the time. Today it features RoadConnect, an IoT program allowing infrastructure professionals to monitor the status of road and highway assets such as bridges, guardrails, utility poles, and crash cushions, in addition to FieldNET, a remote irrigation management and scheduling technology that optimizes field maintenance and monitoring efficiency for agriculture businesses.

Charling sees these and other innovations as central to Lindsay’s future growth, because of the benefits they provide customers in reducing field service hours, lowering costs, and perhaps most critically, improving the sustainability of businesses in these sectors.

As Charling explains “We have used our Azure infrastructure to roll out RoadConnect and to scale it quickly, which has been a huge benefit to us, not only from a cost standpoint but also in terms of speed to market. Moving to the cloud gave FieldNET scalability and reliability gains. On the agriculture side of the business, in particular, it’s really improved the customer experience by increasing sustainability and improving their day-to-day lives.” 

Microsoft’s experience in both the infrastructure and agricultural sectors means the relationship between the two companies is more than just customer and supplier. Instead, it is more like an innovation collaboration, with Microsoft helping Lindsay enhance its products, identify new opportunities, and future-proof its offerings in order to succeed in a changing world.

Problem-solving in real time

The transition from the private data center to Microsoft Azure was smooth in large part because Azure is intuitive and easy to use, and also because of the Microsoft team’s commitment to service and problem-solving, according to Charling.

“Our DevOps manager really enjoys the Azure portal, how easy it is to use, and, just as importantly, he’s been very happy with the responsiveness from the Microsoft team and the assistance they provide. That was something we expected, but we didn’t think we would get it at such a large scale. They have been awesome to work with.”

Charling continues, “It’s a testament to Microsoft’s culture, but, on top of that, Microsoft really understands IoT – and that helps us to manage our platforms and our business. If we reach out to someone at Microsoft, they will have four or five solutions for us. That’s very helpful and something we really appreciate.”

Says Charling, “Since moving to Azure, our uptime and scalability metrics have improved considerably. Being proactive is part of that. Microsoft presents solutions before we even present the problem. It’s what we ask for in a true cloud partner.”

Envisioning the future

What’s more, the collaboration between the two companies shows no sign of slowing down, with Lindsay eager to deliver more exciting innovations in the future and Microsoft ready to provide the platforms and support it needs to do so. Lindsay is rolling out a new offering called the smart pivot, which uses sensors, high-resolution imagery, and advanced algorithms to monitor crop and machine health, automatically detecting issues and helping optimize irrigation. Lindsay is also growing its IoT subscriptions, which have now surpassed 100,000 and are increasing at a significant rate year-over-year. 

But business growth and diversification aren’t the only metrics that matter. Lindsay also has significant sustainability targets to meet. It has pledged to help farmers save more than 700 billion gallons of water and 1 billion kilowatt hours of energy by the end of 2022. As a sign of commitment to these targets, the company has created a public-facing global impact calculator on its website, to share its progress with the world.

“These are pretty lofty water and energy savings goals we are leveraging Azure heavily for. We’re on track, which is important to us because we’re in a unique position to have a really big impact in agricultural irrigation and water consumption in general,” Charling says. “Data enables knowledge, so data collection will be extremely important to improve our offerings, whether they are the IoT products or SaaS solutions. That, in turn, will allow us to provide more tools and knowledge to customers to become more sustainable.”

As Charling sums up: “Partnering with Microsoft is one of the best decisions we have made as a software development group. Our team can’t wait to see what this relationship will continue to bring in the future.”

[1] GlobalAgriculture.org: https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/water.html

[2] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2017: “Water for Sustainable Food and Agriculture”