African technology innovator Sedna Industrial IT Solutions has partnered with video networking and visual collaboration solutions provider Haivision to bring industrial and mining command control room solutions and software to heavy-duty businesses across the continent.

Havison’s technology aims to help teams make informed decisions and react quicker in emergency or critical situations.

“With the need for increased safety, monitoring and operational excellence on the rise, these world-class tools will give mines and industrial players the latest advances to stay safe and stay ahead,” Sedna posits.

“Through this partnership with Haivision, our aim is to bring video feeds and plant supervisory control and data acquisition data from anywhere into a control room, transforming control rooms into crucial information centres. This empowers operators and stakeholders to make mission-critical decisions from a remote location.

“We’re thrilled to drive new innovations that enhance our data engineering capabilities and how we visualise critical data. Undoubtedly, this provides us with a competitive advantage on the continent,” Sedna engineering manager Raymond Mhlongo avers.

He says this partnership follows a long-standing relationship between Sedna and Haivision, but enhances it.

“Sedna has been expanding its footprint significantly and Haivision has been cementing its place on the global stage as the best in the business when it comes to the critical solutions needed to enhance security, monitoring and safety. Together with Sedna’s technical expertise we can help businesses switch on and manage these solutions quickly and efficiently.”

Haivision Africa and Europe sales director Matt Stone says the considerable volume of mining and industrial activity taking place in Africa makes this expansion a natural progression for the company’s Africa strategy.

“Our solution has the immense benefit of being cost-effective and easy to manage at the front end. However, it can be quite complex on the back end, and we need the right people on the ground in the first and second lines of support. This is why we had no hesitation in choosing Sedna as our partner – they have the deep-level expertise and track record we were looking for,” he explains.

Mhlongo informs that the advanced visual collaboration platforms can monitor different dashboards for plants and machinery and provide live video feeds to give a large view for situational awareness.

“Risk is on the rise for businesses in this area, whether through a seismic event, accidents or any unplanned event, including cyberattacks. This is why it is important for mines and manufacturers to rethink the way they are currently monitoring their sites.

“In our experience, many companies in Africa have neglected this aspect for too long and are at increased risk of facing major problems when things go wrong, which can happen in a heartbeat,” he points out.

Haivision provides secure, live, low-latency video for mission-critical applications, with deployments in government, military, aerospace and public safety organisations.

Stone says the same technology can be harnessed to give mining and industrial sites a bird’s eye view of their full operation, so they are in tune with every movement in real time, enhancing security and productivity.

“Our platform is very easy to use, and we can get operators new to the system up and running in 30 minutes. Some solutions can look more complicated than they need to be, while others may be easy to use, but are expensive. Ours works on a Web browser so it is fast, efficient and cost-effective, while being easily adaptable to specific needs” he says.

Haivision says it is “open to grow” further in Africa.

“We see immense potential on the continent and will also look to expand into areas like ports and rail, security operational centres at banks and tech companies, as well as areas like public transport, defence and emergency services.

“However, we see as our first point of entry mining operational centres, which we are driving through this partnership,” Stone explains.