Industrial IoT Accelerator to Speed up the Deployment of Connected Solutions

Business challenge

In pursuit of accelerating the IoT journey for enterprises, Intellias partnered with a German software engineering company to build a platform for enabling industrial IoT deployments. Our IoT platform features a powerful suite of solutions offering advanced capabilities — from device connections to data visualization — to speed up the development of enterprise IoT systems and ensure robust connectivity within industrial IoT device ecosystems.

As industrial companies are increasingly transforming from traditional to digital, the demand for custom IoT solutions is growing at an unprecedented rate. Many industry players, however, are struggling to stay within time and budget constraints when building their IoT systems from the ground up. And while major IoT platform providers offer out-of-the-box software for deploying IoT applications, these solutions still require high levels of customization to meet project-specific requirements. In particular, extensibility requirements can be extremely hard (if not impossible) to meet when starting with a commercially available IoT platform.

To simplify the implementation of IoT systems for organizations, save them precious development time, and help them deliver on their digital strategies, we envisioned our IoT accelerator to serve as a software boilerplate for creating custom IoT applications. Instead of investing colossal funds and resources in costly and time-consuming development, companies will be able to build their solutions up to 50% faster with the help of our cloud IoT platform.

Intellias and our partner joined forces to bring this business idea to life and put our IoT development expertise at the service of companies around the world.

Solution delivered

We gathered a high-caliber engineering team to work on a vertical-first, near end-to-end IoT platform that brings a range of benefits to industrial companies looking to foster productivity using IoT technologies.

Advantages of our IoT accelerator

Our engineers built a scalable IoT platform architecture and an extendable infrastructure enabling fast automated deployments on multiple nodes and ensuring high accessibility of the system.

Apart from offering a fully functional IoT back end, our product features wide custom functionality for the device part — an option that most IoT platforms do not provide. This ensures a frictionless connection to devices and smooth communication between cloud applications and endpoints. It also simplifies the work of embedded developers, enabling them to reuse their code without having to redevelop their system components using new technologies.

Our IoT platform is cloud-agnostic and can support different IaaS cloud systems (MS Azure, AWS, Google Cloud), avoiding cloud provider lock-in. Its scalable infrastructure can also be used for on-premises deployments within security-sensitive enterprises where information should be kept locally. Currently, our platform runs on Azure and bare metal, but it’s due to be configured for AWS and Google Cloud shortly.

Unlike regular off-the-shelf solutions, our platform is highly customizable and flexible, which particularly benefits customers using industry-specific devices. We can easily adapt our solution to an individual company’s needs and challenges and build a dynamic and custom UI for each project, providing a starting point for further in-house development.

Another advantage of our platform is its high efficiency at peak loads, achieved by using the latest technologies and fast data transfer and processing. The platform is designed for high-load systems and offers a cost-effective option for companies with large fleets of IoT devices that generate extensive data streams.

Engineers can use our platform to accelerate the development of solutions for common IoT scenarios (device fleet management, remote asset monitoring, predictive maintenance, production line tracking, digital twins) and industry use cases (smart cities, robotics, vertical farming).

Key features

When building IoT platform, our engineers focused on the most vital set of components to address a wide range of industrial needs and enable developers to deliver smart IoT solutions, manage device infrastructures, and provide efficient data processing.

Core Agent

The Core Agent software can run on any microcomputer and is purpose-built for collecting telemetry data from both edge devices and end devices. The Agent includes daemon programs (running on edge devices) that communicate with sensors, collect high-throughput sensor data, and send it to the back end.

Gateway

The gateway functionality facilitates communication between devices and the back end and includes device initialization and access, device state, device registration, and device health checks.

Reflector

The reflector computes vast amounts of data received from IoT devices and stores telemetry data in a time-series database. It also archives raw data for audit trails and further deep analysis.

Device registry

This service is used for managing information about all available devices: configuration, inventory, maintenance, audit, etc.

Product registry

Our IoT platform supports multi-tenancy (backed by dynamic message schemas), allowing several organizations to work on one deployment. Customers are granted access to use our platform’s services and, in turn, can give that access to their customers. Each tenant can manage their devices, users, solutions, dashboards, etc.

Firmware registry

Over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates allow devices to evolve as new features are implemented. OTA updates are critical for data analysis, device management, maintenance, and configuration. The service tracks device software versions and automatically performs wireless software updates. It also includes rollback mechanisms triggered in edge cases when an update fails.

User service

This service uses the Auth0 identity management system for synchronizing users and groups and providing role-based access control.

Session service

Fleet managers can view and analyze session lists with information on device KPIs, technical metrics, maintenance alerts, and analytics within a fleet management platform. This service also allows for storing dynamic metadata in arbitrary formats and creating custom data models.

Device twin service

This feature is currently in the works and will enable users to view information about devices in real time.

Persistent telemetry analytics

The GraphQL API functionality allows users to make time-based analytics queries with conditions and dynamically extract data in a custom way.

OTA updates solution

Once the OTA firmware update functionality was successfully implemented by our team, our partner suggested building a simple, stripped-down version of the AWS-based OTA solution. As a result, our engineers delivered a completely serverless OTA update application that serves as a budget-friendly alternative for small to medium-sized businesses or comes as an addition to our IoT accelerator.

Business outcome

Applying many years of experience in developing industrial IoT solutions and working hand in hand with our partner, Intellias built a highly customizable software enablement platform to equip enterprises with a much needed IoT accelerator. Our platform is a ready-to-use tool for creating IoT applications and an easy-to-modify framework for customizing solutions to meet organizations’ requirements as well as time and budget limitations.

Our IoT accelerator responds to many roadblocks companies encounter on their path to implementing IoT, including concerns about the speed of technological advancement and integration of new IoT solutions with existing equipment. Our accelerator enables companies to deploy their IoT applications in a few months instead of years and quickly connect their devices to start winning in today’s market.

Thanks to the success of our joint venture, we and our partner have become innovative IoT platform providers who are turning the heads of business leaders in many industries. Our solution is already used in enterprise IoT, robotics, and agriculture, and holds strong potential in logistics, industrial production, construction, retail, and other domains.