IoT Platform for Connected Products
Value Proposition:
There are plenty of reasons to connect your products. It might be to gain an advantage in your market or to keep up with the competition. You might want to offer new services or use the data for predictive maintenance or a stronger aftermarket offer.
Connecting products might be just a competitive advantage or a revolution of your industry. Regardless, you must understand what values connecting your product can provide.
Challenge:
While choosing the right technology and communication protocol can be challenging, it’s usually the first step taken. Choosing or developing a cloud IoT platform is often harder, as the expertise required is very different from that in electrical engineering. And if the platform handles 10 devices, will it scale properly to 10,000? How do you ensure real-time analytics are fast enough for your use cases? Suddenly, the quality of your products is dependent on the uptime and performance of your whole chain of software.
How Beacon Tower fits:
The Beacon Tower architecture is based on many years of experience building IoT platforms. It makes use of well-tested Azure services that ensure a stable, scalable and high-performance solution.
By using Beacon Tower you can focus on your product development, while we ensure Beacon Tower supports it in whatever direction you want to take it.
Key Beacon Tower functionalities that enable Connected Products
Rules & Alarms
Create rules that are applied directly on streaming real-time data. The rules can either be simple thresholds that triggers alarms when sensor values go outside them, or complex rules based on multiple different sensor values and algorithms.
The rules can either start actions or trigger alarms. The alarms can be of varying severity to notify different groups of users.
Asset & Device Management
A core component in any IoT platform is the device manager. In Beacon Tower we use a state-of-the-art scalable device manager that can manage any number of devices. It supports updating firmware or properties on single devices, batches or all devices of a certain type, depending on your needs. It can also provide a full overview of what devices are working properly and which devices have lost connection or are behaving irregularly.
Real Time Telemetry
The Real Time Telemetry processing is the core of Beacon Tower’s signal processing. It allows you to create rules that triggers alarms or actions within milliseconds from receiving the signal.
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Condition Monitoring
Using rules and real time telemetry to visualize equipment condition in graphs allows you to see trends, compare signals and understand your assets, while getting notifications if something critical happens. You can customize a dashboard for each type of asset and for each node in the node hierarchy to ensure the right information is always available.
Business Modelling
Assets can be structured in ‘node hierarchies’, allowing you to model Beacon Tower after your business. Model them by geographical location, customers, asset properties – or all of them – supporting different roles within your organisation.
Nested Organisations
Beacon Tower has a flexible hierarchical access system that allows you, your customers and their customers into Beacon Tower. You can decide what level of autonomy your customers should have, i.e. if they manage their own data, devices or users. Beacon Tower can further be white labelled in multiple layers. This allows you to provide Beacon Tower as a platform for your products if needed.
Relevant links:
Please refer to the Platform page for more info about features and functionalities. Get a quote on your solution.
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How do we get started with Connected Products?
01
Inception
Technology discussions usually tend to come up early but it is at least equally important to also, when the first idea of connecting a new or existing product, identify and evaluate the use cases & product value with the goal of creating a real business case. If your company has not launched connected products before, you also need to evaluate the impact on the organisation. Can the existing sales and support organisation manage this within their existing processes? Often a connected product brings new challenges that you need to be ready for.
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How we help with the business case development
We can help you through the initial stages of product development as we have done so with multiple products and companies before. We can help you identify which use cases bring most value, what things should not be missed in a business case and also provide you with an accurate estimate on what your cloud platform will cost. All to make sure you can take an informed first decision to start your IoT Journey.
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Pilot & Initial Launch
When running the first Proof-of-Concept and Pilot you want to use these to reduce or remove high risk challenges. By identifying what those are you can make sure you don’t run the wrong course for too long. It is important to be able to test products, use cases and technology with little effort and quickly. A proper PoC and Pilot should make sure the product launch is successful.
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How Beacon Tower secures an effective Pilot
Together we can identify the key risk areas that need to be tested to ensure the final product will be successful. By using Beacon Tower you can get a PoC and Pilot up and running in a couple of days. And we can quickly adapt and change the solution based on new findings in the PoC to continue testing.
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Scale up
Scaling up usually means your product was successful and you now need to scale up your solution, sometimes exponentially in terms of performance and support of use-cases. The product is probably quite well tested by now, but now instead your choice and implementation of platform will be tested. Having the wrong platform at this stage can prove disastrous as all products can start behaving erratic if your platform can’t cope with the load and enterprise use-cases.
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How Beacon Tower helps you scale
Beacon Tower’s architecture, features and infrastructure are designed to be able to scale from a few devices to several thousands. Not only from a capacity standpoint, but also by providing functionality that you might first need with a large-scale roll-out. This allows Beacon Tower to follow you through your whole IoT journey. We regularly load test all components and make use of Microsoft Azure’s features to ensure it can scale effortlessly. These tests will also be run specifically for you during the Proof-of-Concept to ensure there are no surprises later. We also monitor all services to early indetify any irregularities and adjust them before they cause issues.