New device management solution helps companies overcome barrier to IoT at scale
4 November 2015 – Internet of Things (IoT) specialist 1248 will be unveiling DevicePilot at next week’s ARM® TechCon in Silicon Valley, a new as-a-Service solution for managing the growing IoT ecosystem. DevicePilot continuously monitors and manages connected devices over their complete life-cycle and presents a simple dashboard showing how many devices have been deployed, where and by whom, how many are not working and why.
With internet connected products growing at 25% per year, automatic asset management, monitoring and lifetime support becomes essential as projects move from pilot stage to deployment with thousands or millions of devices. The time and operational cost of manually logging-in to each device to perform an upgrade or check if it is working is a barrier to scaling for the future of any connected product. 1248 has designed DevicePilot with feedback from companies in several markets and its application is universal, from smart energy to smart homes and cities to transport systems, as well as industrial monitoring and control.
DevicePilot is delivered as-a-Service (aaS), with nothing to pay or install up-front – and is free for small numbers of devices to trial and integrate the service. With the IoT ecosystem migrating to an as-a-Service pricing model, DevicePilot integrates into this value chain, taking a small percentage of the monthly service revenue in return for enabling scaling by efficiently ensuring that each device continues to deliver its promised value.
1248 is an ARM mbed™ Partner, established to drive collaboration in IoT systems by bringing together leading embedded and cloud companies, component manufacturers, system integrators and OEMs. DevicePilot is integrated with the ARM mbed IoT Device Platform, based on open standards, technology and services to accelerate wider adoption of IoT systems at scale.
“The benefits of IoT are many, but there are also many challenges to successfully deploy an IoT solution at scale,” said Pilgrim Beart, CEO of 1248. “Unlike web or smartphone apps, connected devices must be deployed into the physical world where lots of things can go wrong, which can lead to unhappy customers, expensive support and damage to brand.”
“The IoT needs to work like the Web: through an open ecosystem of interoperating, off-the-shelf products and services, each focussed on doing one thing very well,” adds Beart. “While some of the ecosystem components required to enable IoT are already available such as databases and web services, we believe that device management is still a major gap in the set of services required for successful IoT deployment – one which DevicePilot is designed to fill.”
“Managing IoT devices is a complex hurdle within the IoT value chain,” said Zach Shelby, vice president of marketing, IoT business, ARM. “The ARM mbed IoT Device Platform makes it easier for developers to build and deploy IoT devices at scale and coupling this with 1248’s DevicePilot will help to alleviate this problem in IoT deployments.”
DevicePilot will be undergoing alpha trials with selected partners in a variety of markets from late 2015 and will be generally available in early 2016. Companies interested in taking part should contact info@devicepilot.com.
Use case – DevicePilot in the Energy Sector
One of the companies about to trial DevicePilot is Moixa, a business deploying an energy storage product, which shifts solar production to the consumption peak in the evening, delivering benefits to homeowners, grid operators and also addresses climate change. The product needs to be connected for multiple reasons including remote management, demand response, triggering energy storage/delivery in response to wider grid needs, and performance reporting. And if the product isn’t working, or has lost connection, then the company cannot bill. For Moixa, manual monitoring is not practical or cost effective as installations grow from 1,000’s to 10,000’s devices and the customer experience would simply not be acceptable.
“The answer is automation of the process of device management,” said Chris Wright, CTO of Moixa “Getting to scale requires process quality and to some extent process quality requires scale to justify the investment in it. DevicePilot can help resolve this conundrum.”
For more information about Moixa, visit www.moixa.com
