Fluke Reliability acquires AI-powered vibration analytics company Azima DLI

Fluke Reliability, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortive Corporation, announced that it has acquired Washington-based Azima DLI, which provides subscription-based remote condition monitoring and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered vibration analytics software.

Azima DLI's solution enables industrial businesses to increase asset uptime, reduce reactive and unnecessary preventive maintenance, and optimize manufacturing operations and asset health, while maximizing revenue through accurate, predictive insights.

“We're very excited,” said Fluke Reliability President Ankush Malhotra. “This business will empower our customers with cutting-edge vibration diagnostic capabilities that revolutionize operations, optimize productivity, and enable data-driven decision-making. I think this is a really pivotal point in our journey as Fluke Reliability.”

Customers can execute proactive maintenance and make predictive maintenance attainable for any size plant

Today's announcement means Fluke Reliability is further poised to help customers shift from reactive, low-volume machine health analysis into advanced and scalable predictive maintenance and reliability programs. Malhotra emphasized the unique power and scope of the analytics and diagnostic engine that Azima DLI built over 25 years of working with a variety of customers, including the U.S. government, and collecting and assessing data on 80,000 unique machines.

Furthermore, a lot of large and small industrial facilities have their critical machines already covered because they cannot afford for them to go down, but they have a desire to expand that coverage into more assets. “I think that the strength of the Azima DLI offering allows us to go to our customers and cover a number of assets that they would love to include in their reliability program, but they are not able to because they don't have a scalable product to do that,” Malhotra added.

Remote machine analysis by expert vibration analysts helps customers address the current skills shortage

The acquisition includes Azima DLI’s remote condition monitoring solution, where a team of experts perform complex vibration analysis. With the acquisition, said Malhotra, “we've gotten over 30 analyst experts around the globe, Cat III / Cat IV vibration analyst experts who have looked at multiple machines. What they're doing is supplementing and complementing the gaps that our customers have of that expertise and provide them with insight” into maintenance actions, enhancing operations, and reducing downtime/cost.

These services also can help alleviate plant teams that are expertise constrained or operating with reduced headcount, reinforcing Fluke Reliability’s strategic commitment to advancing connected reliability while continuing to bring innovative solutions to customers. “We see this inflection point and tipping point where more and more customers are now because of technology and access to data and price points,” said Malhotra, “that they can now go do predictive maintenance, and I think this gives them that ability to do it.”

Acquisition amplifies Fluke Reliability’s existing connected reliability strategy

Fluke Reliability CTO Aaron Merkin emphasized that Azima DLI’s technology offering along with the workflow and corps of analysts enables them to provide a comprehensive, black box condition monitoring as a service that can cost effectively expand the balance of plant. “Azima DLI’s expert system is unique in the industry. There are other entrants into the market who are trying to catch up to it, but it's very difficult in a reasonable amount of time to compress the 25 years of experience that they have into an offering that's truly competitive. Other vendors have attempted to build automated diagnosis systems, and then they fall back to anomaly detection instead, as they realize how difficult it is.”

Joe Van Dyke, vice president of engineering for Azima DLI, commented that “we are incredibly proud of this best-in-class vibration analytics and remote condition monitoring platform. As part of Fluke Reliability, we are excited to see more businesses benefit from our solution, work with their existing customer base, and penetrate new industries - increasing uptime and efficiencies.”

Azima DLI's innovative products deliver peak reliability, availability, and uptime, and include the Watchman 360 vibration analytics platform, which detects specific faults, predicts time-to-failure, and recommends corrective action. The solution has been developed over 30+ years and analyses up to 93% of machine tests without human intervention. The algorithm filters out issues that don't need expert analysis, helping industrial teams prioritize during the current skills shortage.

Malhotra added that Fluke Reliability appreciated the broader application of Azima DLI technology and services across many industry verticals and a wide variety of company sizes. “Anyone who's starting off a program and wants to cover a certain number of assets, they can get going. We feel this is a great addition to what we had, and amplifies everything else we were doing with our vibration solutions, our services, and our eMaint CMMS software.”

Azima DLI is a predictive maintenance industry leader in scalable, hosted, predictive condition monitoring services. DLI Engineering was founded in 1966, acquired by Azima in 2008 to establish the Azima DLI reliability-as-a-service system, and then purchased by SymphonyAI in 2019.

Fluke Reliability, a division of Fluke Corporation, offers reliability and maintenance teams the tools, software, and services they need to optimize asset performance. Home to brands – PRUFTECHNIK, and eMaint – Fluke Reliability serves more than 70,000 technicians worldwide with a relentless dedication to quality, innovation, and service.