ADB
An All-round IoT Solution Stack

Adding the ‘IoT flavor’ into both consumer and professional products has opened doors to a number of possibilities for businesses to extend their traditional business model. With over 15 years of expertise in providing solutions for large Telco and Pay-TV operators, Swiss-based ADB enjoys a head start in positioning itself as a turnkey IoT solutions provider. For instance, the company’s flagship technology for remote management, which is widely used for broadband and WiFi devices, is also a crucial ingredient for its IoT solution offering. ADB has put together its expertise in connectivity, embedded services, and back-end cloud to create ioCentro, an all-round SaaS-based IoT management suite. ADB’s typical clientele includes companies from telecom, smart appliances, HVAC, refrigeration, and food services sector. “Brands and product makers typically miss continuous contact with their product and its end user once the product is handed over to the sales channels. With ioCentro we allow them to control and update their product’s capabilities over time and to build applications on top of it. This turns the product itself into a platform for the delivery of services, which can be customized in the light of usage analytics,” says Roberto Pellegrini, VP of IoT Product Line at ADB.

The platform’s functional modularity with a pay-as-you-go pricing model come as a boon for both mid and large businesses looking to introduce IoT as a phased approach. Clients can leverage ADB’s IoT gateway technologies—including connectivity boards and software, remote management, and analytics tools—to project valuable device data compiled by ioCentro’s cloud core and draw benefits from product-centric business processes backed by the ioCentro platform. In effect, the platform delivers a real-time “living inventory” of products as well as the end user’s interactions. This, in turn, renders ioCentro a powerful CRM tool. Both in consumer and in professional sectors, mobile apps for end users and servicing technicians are an effective tool for remote interaction with connected products.

In this respect, ioCentro provides a range of back-end functionalities which are purposely designed to offload complexity from mobile apps, making their time to market, cost of development, and maintenance drastically more efficient than traditional approaches. Support for integration with third-party services through well-defined APIs, such as for Energy Management applications, is another out-of-the-box capability of ioCentro.

With ioCentro’s Analytics console, IoT data logs can be compiled and processed via configurable dashboards to extract intelligence. This can throw more light on where and how product features are used, their time and space correlation, and can as well provide advanced diagnostics. Furthermore, it allows real-time analytics of data streaming with configurable event processing rules to trigger commands and notifications. ioCentro, with all-round capabilities in its sleeve, therefore offers a one-stop-shop solution and eliminates the cost for companies to coordinate multiple component vendors.

Since introducing ioCentro in 2015, some of the most renowned product makers in the B2B and B2C space are today ADB’s clients. One such client was in a predicament when they had to bring a new generation of connected products to the market in a short window of time. “They could not really find a way to harmonize and unify the approach because they had different divisions and each was actually approaching the IoT project as a subproject. So the result was many different initiatives that were un-integrated,” recalls Pellegrini. ioCentro became a horizontal abstraction into all of the client’s internal initiatives. They were able to drastically reduce IT investment for the IoT initiative and eliminate complexities associated with the traditional homegrown approach.

Moving ahead, the ioCentro roadmap is adding new features to overcome the limits of ‘embedded intelligence’ on devices through ‘virtualized’ functionalities developed on ioCentro, which effectively allows extending a product’s capabilities over time without a physical retrofit.