The Internet of Things has long become reality. In 1990, there were 300,000 desktop computers in existence – albeit generally with no Internet connection. Around the millennium, their number had grown to 300 million. Today, smartphones alone add up to a global “population” of far more than five billion.
Explosive growth
It is not possible to get a realistic count of all the devices that communicate via the net today. But the numbers are definitely still rising. Gartner estimates that there will be 20 billion devices world-wide in 2020. Others even put the figure at 600 billion for the same date. We are talking devices that can report conditions, and sometimes even receive and carry out instructions. Everyone has heard of Smart Homes with networked thermostats, lights and alarm systems, and also of “wearables”. But there are exciting applications in the commercial sector and in production as well, such as sensors on machines or household appliances that need to be serviced by qualified personnel and should not fail, if possible. Another area of application is Predictive Maintenance, which involves the detection of impending outages and maintenance requirements by means of reliable prognosis tools.
Perfect harmony
So where does the EASY Cloud Platform come in? The answer is: the data from all these machines and devices can be safely stored, retained and processed in the protected EASY Cloud environment. To this purpose, the EASY Cloud Platform provides services, interfaces (APIs), and software development kits. It also perfectly harmonizes with data import web services.
Unbeatable added value: connecting data in the Cloud with business logic
But there’s more. On the EASY Cloud Platform, the data can be assigned a business logic. EASY allows you to do what very few other providers can offer today, namely trigger a specific process without major programming effort via the Cloud Platform and device data. A device signals a critical status? In that case, service staff can be notified per SMS, e-mail or Push e-mail so that an appointment can be made with the customer or, better yet, the disturbance can be remedied in advance. The implementation of such a Cloud-based solution can be realized swiftly with the EASY Cloud Platform’s modular building system. Anyway, this is only one of many possible business logics. Plus, clients for numerous end devices are ready to run in any language in no time.
The missing link…
The EASY Cloud Platform thus always offers exactly that one bit of intelligence that is needed to interconnect systems, tools, processes and, of course, people, and control them via apps. Neither systems nor interfaces are capable of doing that by themselves. So, it will be interesting to see what IoT applications will be realized via the Platform in the future.