Buddy Platform brings new meaning to old IoT data
Buddy Platform brings new meaning to old IoT data
While it’s easy to get caught up with all the bells and whistles of autonomous car development and home automation, I firmly contend that some of the most exciting things in IoT are innovations that are transforming traditional industries like viticulture, shipping, agriculture and manufacturing. The companies responsible don’t always become household names but they are busy behind the scenes creating quiet revolutions.
One example of these is Buddy Platform, a Seattle-based company with a global platform for accessing and analyzing data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, appliances and sensors.
I spoke with Buddy Platform CEO Dave McLauchlan. I him recently about their latest developments to learn more.
He explained their purpose in a nutshell:
“Our thesis is that we are seeing an enormous volume of IoT data generated by companies that have never really had to manage large volumes of data before like dishwasher companies and garage door opener companies and car manufacturers. These companies need to know how to manage their data, secure it, and get access to it.
We are a platform for that data to come in raw, in whatever form venerated (e.g. from a sensor or a device that has a bunch of sensors). We can shape it, process and store it securely. We can also perform real time queries on that data, e.g. ‘How many cars with more than 18,000 miles on the clock have break levels of less than X and engine temperatures of greater than Y?’ Then we can perform actions based on real time queries. An example is water management – if a query triggers a leak, then we can send a control signal back to a device such as ‘if water level greater than x then send an off signal to the water pump’. That can all be handled in real time on our platform at very large scale. Hence, customers have all the benefit from owning the data and the learnings that come from the data generated by connected devices but they don’t have to manage the infrastructure, or scale it or maintain it or even evolve the platform as technologies evolve.”
Buddy transforms the expensive and labor-intensive process of collecting, managing and analyzing IoT big data into a fast, simple and real-time process. Buddy’s customers are in a range of sectors — from airline, agriculture and automotive to robotics, telecom and government. and include Sears, Lono and Washington’s Lottery.
As well as their key business they’re building out a fully hosted, fully managed, auto-scaling implementation of Parse Server targeted at higher volume applications. You’ll remember Parse, it was a service used by software developers to store and manage data in their apps that was originally owned by Facebook. They’ve also been working on the initiative IoT for impact, a call to action to the IoT industry to together help solve -and even predict— emergency community crises.
Within IoT there’s a dichotomy between the DIY and ‘Do It For Me’ camps in the IoT industry. I discussed this with McLauchlan who notes:
“We sell a solution directly to folks who don’t want to hire developers and build. more than half top 10 customers are folks that have gone and built their own IoT system and decided that’s not really worth it on an economic basis. Our belief is that the hype curve in it is comfortably ahead of the reality curve and the middle American manufacturer — like the washing machine manufacturer — now they’ve got to worry about device data and securing information. They just want it solved and they want to be able to tell their customers that their data is secure. There’s a very prominent role we can play there, the customers still own the data , can still use and derive value for it, we’re simply providing the mechanism for them to do so.”
Buddy has recently announced intent to acquire IoT security and device management platform, Zentri Inc, a company that operates a Silicon-To-Cloud platform for product connectivity. The company’s platform comprises ZentriOS, an operating system (OS) purpose-built for commercial-grade IoT, as well as other ingredients to connect a client’s product, create a dashboard to manage and monitor in-field products, and build responsive mobile applications for customers.
As McLauchlan describes it:
“They’ve made an operating system that runs on top of commodity hardware with the idea being that by dropping software system onto the hardware you don’t have to go and write the software that will enable that hardware to become 1) Connected to the internet and 2) Securely connect to a mobile application or some mobile mechanism and 3) Being managed as one of a fleet of devices. Thus, with their software a customer can take commodity hardware and deploy that software and make that advice all ready to. So if you were building washing machines, say a million a year, in terms of being able to check in on the fleet and their performance, push out software as necessary, all the block and tackle of how you manage these devices, all of this is what they do in their operating system.
We realized that there’s almost perfect synergy that our customers were looking for a way to keep a track of 100,000 devices and their customers wanted to do more with the data. so we realized it was a really good opportunity.”
Buddy also acquiring IoT buddies
Not a company to rest on their laurels, Buddy also announced intent to acquire Noveda, a company that develops and provides Web-based energy monitoring solutions for conventional and renewable energy systems.
As McLauchlan explained:
“We saw an opportunity to dip our toe into the first vertical that we want to focus on, smart cities. Noveda have deployments across the US, Canada and the Middle East. They take all the data generated by their customers, give it to us, we process it send it back to them and they use it to create dashboards of how buildings are performing in real time. They literally show these dashboards in buildings with smart meters and people can see how a building is consuming electricity, thus causing people to be more energy efficient.”
Noveda’s customers include Staples, the US federal government and public schools in New York City. Add these to the organizations already working with Buddy and Zentri and there’s going to be a whole lot of meaning bought to IoT generated data through the work of this trio.
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