We were fortunate to have Kim Pearson, the CEO of New Boundary Technologies, participate in a panel discussion on “Enabling Digital Transformation with IoT” at the Summit. New Boundary Technologies has been pioneering innovative Internet of Things (IoT) applications for more than three decades. New Boundary’s RemoteAware™ IoT Application Service drastically cuts the time it takes to implement IoT applications, and eliminates the need for software engineers in house. Their application is hardware independent and provides single pane-of-glass web dashboards, alerts and reports customized to customers’ needs. RemoteAware delivers secure, private-label branded IoT web applications to monitor and control remote sensors and equipment in just one day.
RemoteAware now integrates with Octave™, Sierra Wireless’ all-in-one edge-to-cloud solution for connecting industrial assets to the cloud. By combining Octave and RemoteAware, complete end-to-end enterprise IoT solutions can be delivered in a matter of days for a broad range of remote monitoring and control applications in sectors like water and energy, agriculture, oil and gas, smart city, and industrial automation.
After the panel, we sat down with Mr. Pearson to learn more about how his company is using Octave, to simplify the development of Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications for his customers.
Q: What are some of the main challenges you see around IIoT application development?
New Boundary Technologies CEO Kim Pearson:
A. IIoT development can be incredibly complex, time consuming and expensive because it involves hardware, software, communications and security. Creating a total solution typically involves getting offerings from multiple vendors to work together.
Many companies don’t have the technical expertise in-house to develop the software to get data from their edge devices to the cloud. Even if they do have this expertise, the programming is extremely complicated, and the project will often get pushed down the to-do list because of other commitments.
An unforeseen issue for many customers is surprise cellular bills up to hundreds or thousands of dollars because of unpredictable connectivity costs. These kinds of surprise expenses can significantly lower the ROI for a solution.
Q: What interested you about Octave?
A: We learned about Octave at IoT Fuse earlier this year. We immediately recognized how the all-in-one solution simplifies the process to securely bring together edge devices, cellular connectivity and cloud APIs. Octave clearly enables easier IIoT application development - something that has been sorely missing in the industry. We began utilizing Octave soon after we learned about it.
Q: How do you use Octave?
A: Octave lets our customers develop complete IIoT applications very quickly at low cost. We can rely on Octave to get data from the edge to the cloud, at which point our RemoteAware IoT Application Service takes the data to provide to the customer-facing application.
Sierra Wireless Ready-to-Connect devices like the FX30 gateway and the mangOH® open source IoT hardware platform play a role in simplifying development. So too does Octave’s data orchestration technology, which allows us to securely extract, orchestrate and act on data from equipment to the cloud.
Customers also don’t have to worry about unforeseen cellular bills because the Sierra Wireless Global Wireless Network delivers application connectivity at a predictable cost, from more than 660 mobile networks in more than 230 territories around the world.
Q: What are some of the benefits you’ve seen from using Octave?
A: First and foremost: speed. Octave drastically reduces the time it takes to develop a solution that collects data from edge devices and sends it to the cloud. In our lab, we hooked up a number of sensors and had that information connected to the internet within two hours. For our customers, that means data extraction and orchestration is fast and easy. In less than a day, they’re connected from edge to cloud and can start leveraging their data.
Creating industrial IoT applications that scale to deploy and manage thousands of assets can be costly. With Octave, the cost of getting data from the edge to the cloud is drastically reduced because data extraction and orchestration is so simple. You can focus more time and resources on using the IoT data to improve your business.
When developing custom IIoT edge devices, Octave and the mangOH platform reduce months of development to just a few days. Reducing time and cost takes a lot of the risk out of projects, and greatly increases the likelihood the application will cross the finish line and go to market.
Octave and RemoteAware work hand-in-hand to provide full stack solutions at a low cost with rapid time to market. Together, we’ve created a unique solution that addresses the pain points we know our customers experience.
As the experience of New Boundary Technologies demonstrates, Octave is a powerful tool for taking an IIoT application from proof of concept, to commercial deployment. Start with Sierra to learn more about how Octave enables companies to simplify their IIoT application development, de-risk their deployment, and focus on data rather than infrastructure - allowing them to unlock value in today’s connected world.