How we moved a water trading pool up to the cloud: My Best Tech

Peter Lawford is the chief executive of Waterpool, which is based in the Victorian town of Kyabram and operates a water trading pool that helps farmers to irrigate their crops. Here’s how Waterpool recently moved its trading pool to the cloud.

“Basically, Waterpool runs a trading pool for agricultural water entitlements. The closest business to ours is probably real estate – we trade water rights from farm to farm.

“A pooled exchange is like a double auction system – buyers and sellers are placed in a pool, and their bids are then matched.

“Our pooled exchange process had a lot of manual data input. The customers would need to fill in a form in our office, or send it through by post, phone or fax, and then we would manually enter that information into our system.

“The second method of trade is through an online trading platform, where offers to buy or sell water entitlements are matched up with existing bidders automatically.

“We engaged a company called Advance Computing to develop an online trading room for us, which is hosted through Microsoft Azure.

“By going to a cloud-based website, it allows for the customers to trade online directly without the forms. That eliminated the need for documentation for them, and data entry for us, so it takes a lot less time.”