A Passion for Public Sector Service

In 2010, the water and wastewater utilities EPIC's engineers worked with every day were flying blind. The EPA estimated more than 240,000 water-main breaks and 170,000 sewer-main breaks occurred across the country every year, yet the software built to prevent them — complex, standalone systems built for utilities far larger than the ones EPIC actually served — put real-time infrastructure intelligence out of reach for most small and mid-sized agencies. Most were left running on spreadsheets, paper work orders, and the philosophy of "fix it when it breaks."

So EPIC proposed something different to the National Science Foundation: an infrastructure intelligence system, code-named Neptune, built around a simple idea — give every utility, no matter its size, instant map-based access to its own asset and budget data. That SBIR-backed research became the technical foundation for Simplify i3® (Integrated Infrastructure Operations Platform) — the platform that helps public agencies move from reactive patchwork to proactive operations today.