Re-Introducing Interloc Informer, Part II, or “What Happened To The Mobile Part of The Name?”

As I outlined in my last blog, in 2025, we re-launched our flagship mobile solution, previously known as Mobile Informer, as UX Suite. But there’s more to the equation.

Without getting too far into the technical bits, a lot of what makes Mobile Informer work is based on the Informer Server component that installs to Maximo (or MAS) as an add-on. This Server manages data to be synchronized to and from the mobile devices, and resolves any data collisions that might occur along the way. Since 2010 and through multiple updates (we’re now on Informer Server 6.4), we’ve refined our approach to improve performance and reliability, and now have a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) product that is capable of synchronizing data at scale, and we realized there might be other use cases that could take advantage of this capability.

We explored this idea in conversations with partners and customers, which helped us to understand some of their needs and sent us to the drawing board. In short order, our ideas took shape and we set out to develop EdgeSync.

Informer EdgeSync leverages the same Informer Server technology as the UX Suite (and legacy Mobile Informer solution), but instead of synching data to mobile devices, it synchronizes between servers. We quickly identified three separate use cases which could benefit from this ability, including both uni-directional and bi-directional scenarios.

First up, uni-directional use cases:

• Zero Downtime Upgrades: By enabling synchronization of data from an existing environment into the new, upgraded environment, it becomes possible to extend testing of the upgraded environment beyond the bounds of a normal outage window.
• Synchronization from Production to Non-Production or Pre-Production Environments: Traditionally, getting production data to a dev or test environment, or even to a reporting server, has meant a multi-step process. Either make a backup and restore it to the dev/test environment, or run periodic ETL processes that Extract, Transform, and Load data to your reporting server. With EdgeSync, you can establish a one-way synchronization from the production environment to these other servers to ensure that up-to-date production data is available for use, saving time and simplifying resolution of problems that may arise in production (which can frequently be related to data issues).

Instead of rushing to upgrade the environment, validate data, and test performance before bringing the new system online in a hard cutover, organizations can establish the new environment, synchronize data, and continue using the lower environment while validating the upgraded environment, while knowing that data entered into the lower environment will not be lost. Once satisfied that the upgraded environment is ready, simply redirect users to the new instance (even on a rolling basis, by team or site) and finalize the upgrade at your convenience.

Once we realized that Informer Server was usable (and useful!) in more than just mobile application scenarios, we considered that maybe “Mobile Informer” wasn’t quite the right name anymore.

So, quietly, we re-branded from Mobile Informer to Interloc Informer, and expanded from a product to a portfolio! Now, we’ve got Informer Server, Informer EdgeSync, and Informer UX Suite Mobility. But we’re not done yet. In the near future, we plan to release new Interloc Informer capabilities to enable organizations to make better use of new MAS functionality, and get the most from their investment. We’re in the early days of this expansion of Interloc Informer, but we’ll be sure to keep you updated as we go.