RPM's customers have previously deployed its products at mine sites or corporate offices on desktops or servers. This, however, meant that there were some restrictions around accessing the software, affected by the reliability, accessibility and speed of private network connections, as well as hardware performance.

RPM said its cloud hosting solution enables users to access its software products, applications, solutions and associated data from anywhere and anytime from inside a safe, secure and high-performance computing environment.

"Big data in the mining industry is nothing new, it has been around for years. The problem has always been leveraging that data to make better planning and operational decisions. But you can't do this if accessing the data is too difficult or in disparate unconnected systems," RPM's CEO and managing director Richard Mathews said.

"RPM's enterprise approach to software development makes it easier to unlock, digest and share data within, across and outside the organisation.

"Moving our software solutions to the ‘cloud' has always been a goal of ours; however, we knew that to accomplish this we had to re-architect our suite of software products to enable us to offer this alternative method of delivery to our customers."

After six years of development, Mathews added, RPM is now ready to offer its solutions through "a hosted offering using a dedicated cloud delivery team" and has already sold a cloud-based solution to a customer in North America.

RPM will also continue to offer its traditional delivery approaches.

"This is just another example of how our Intelligent Mining software suite of products gives miners, mining contractors and original equipment manufacturers around the world new, improved and high-performing user-experience options," Mathews said.

"Every company has different policies and visions for their computing environment, so a one size fits all approach never works. There are certainly companies that want to make the transition to the cloud environment and RPM is ready to support them in this endeavour."

RPM has also established a dedicated team whose responsibility it is to ensure its customers a smooth transition to the cloud.