General-purpose IoT platforms have outgrown their usefulness as manufacturers and enterprises today have a clearer view of their strategies, priorities and need for third party technology,” begins Michael Campbell, President, and CEO, EdgeIQ. Offering a different pathway for the market, EdgeIQ empowers innovators with the software tools they need for digital transformation of connected product businesses.
At first IoT was about simply adding connectivity to a device or a product. It didn’t matter what it connected to – it just need a way to talk to the outside world – even before that meant the cloud. Companies wanted to connect products initially as a means to remotely diagnose problems and even fix them. Then customers wanted operational data, manufacturers saw value in this information and needed to normalize it while managing who had access to it. Before long, highly intelligent products that produced massive amounts of data had very complex software challenges – well beyond a Linux Operating System or Firmware. IoT was no longer just about connectivity modules, processors and memory chips – it was about highly complex and distributed software – at the edge and in the cloud. In the famous words of Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world” and nowhere is this more true than the challenges and opportunity facing companies that make connected products – from digital signs to drones and dialysis machines.
Manufacturers are under enormous pressure to build better products that win in the marketplace, at higher margins with fewer people. That’s not new. What is new is the imperative to deliver valuable software-centric services around their connected devices. It doesn’t stop with providing and monetizing data and software. Connected product companies are literally re-inventing themselves with entirely new business models like ‘Device as a Service’ or ‘Data as a Service’.
The Software Foundation of Digital Transformation for Connected Product Companies
“EdgeIQ provides the API-based software infrastructure that organizations need, but should not waste time and money building, to properly manage connected product businesses. Afterall, you can’t monetize what you can’t manage” explains Campbell. It begins with Device Operations, which is all the requirements of device and user lifecycle. This includes fleet management, user and account management, deployment and configuration tools, wellness monitoring, software management and even decommissioning. Once devices are deployed and managed, organizations need a way to simplify integrating them with edge and cloud infrastructure, applications and services. EdgeIQ refers to this as Service Orchestration. Service Orchestration handles all the cross-account synchronization and certificate management for a customer’s chosen cloud services. This is something that sets EdgeIQ apart as it is based on a Bring Your Own Cloud approach and creates an important separation and enhanced security to its solutions. The final pillar of the EdgeIQ offering is Data Management. “We created an architecture and solution that allows customers to control their own Data Destiny,” emphasizes Campbell. EdgeIQ was not designed to be or replace your cloud infrastructure, but rather to feed it. The Data Management services of the EdgeIQ platform uniquely ingest and normalize data where it is produced and then send that data directly to its destination without passing through or being stored in an EdgeIQ cloud account. This eliminates latency, increases security and provides more control and ownership over device data.
On its journey so far, EdgeIQ has helped numerous customers across a wide range of markets – from networking to medical devices, supply chain, smart building, physical security, manufacturing and more. One of the largest physical security companies in the world built an entirely new offering for operational visibility and control of millions of security endpoints by working with EdgeIQ. The customer could build and own the entire application layer by simply leveraging the EdgIQ service – a perfect and highly scalable abstraction layer that served them well for years.
EdgeIQ
Management:
Michael Campbell
Description:
Our epiphany was that the world needed a CRM for machines, just as much as they need to manage customer relationships. The lifecycle of deploying, monitoring and managing connected products is necessary. But it doesn’t have to be complex. We created Device Lifecycle Management (DLM) to dramatically simplify and scale your connected product management.
