The Internet of Things is accelerating at a crazy speed; according to forecasters there will be around 25 billion devices by the end of 2020, and to encash the massive opportunity of IoT enters thethings.iO. It is one of the simplest enterprise IoT platforms in the market. The company works at the back-end for IoT, collecting, analyzing and visualizing data coming from connected devices. And finally lets companies focus less on the cloud platform and more on the product and sales.
The company has been serving various hardware companies since 2014 in three easy ways. Firstly, one can deploy a fully scalable real-time storage solution within hours for a fraction of the cost. Secondly, the company integrates things from multiple sources and protocols in one intuitive dashboard or apps. Thirdly, it is easy to connect the IoT devices with more advanced algorithms to analyze or predict potential failure with the data.
The Backbone of thethings.iO
Marc Pous is the CEO and the Co-Founder of thethings.iO. Marc originally hails from Barcelona and Munich is his second home. Marc is a member of Internet of Things Council and manages the IoT communities in both Barcelona and Munich. Furthermore, he organizes meet-ups and is also responsible for co-organizing the international event IoT Stars during MWC (Mobile World Congress).
Previously he has worked as a researcher and developer at public and private research centers, which are focused on IoT, smart cities and open data fields. He has also worked as a Web Developer. Now he creates IoT products as a hobby, from a connected sofa for a music festival to beer mugs in Munich’s Oktoberfest and Christmas lights that light up when one tweets @thethingsIO. He has earned the nickname of IoT Giant due to his massive stature and efforts towards IoT.
Bringing New Services and Solutions
thethings.iO is the IoT platform that collects, analyzes and visualizes data. This allows its customers to monitor and manage their devices in real-time and to get flexible analytic reports. For now, the company provides three types of solutions for IoT, that include; Things Manager, Cloud Code, and Apps Manager.
Things Manager mainly collects data and manages devices and products with the most simplistic approach. Whereas the Cloud Code is an algorithm that analyzes data from devices in real time, every hour of every day. Last but not the least, Apps Manager enables third parties to access a subset of data or devices with a mobile app or dashboards. Users can build, drag and drop dashboards in just a few minutes for all the actors from the user’s project. thethings.iO works on custom brand, which means under the URL of the customer and the corporate palette. If needed thethings.iO can work on-premise at its customer’s infrastructure.
What Makes the Services Unique?
Recently, the company has started to help companies to launch their products into the market of several verticals such as connected home, assets tracking and liquid management. thethings.iO is a hardware and connectivity agnostic. Additionally, it is very well integrated with Sigfox, NB-IoT and LoRa plus GPRS and WiFi.
The company provides the most simple and innovative enterprise IoT platform. Customers working with the company can start analyzing data after few days of using thethings.iO. However, the company’s main goal is to minimize the total time spent by a customer on analyzing data.
Customer Satisfaction is the Only Motto
The Barcelona-based company has helped its customers to choose the right technologies and protocols to make connectivity more efficient. This enables customers to save money. Most of the time, the company tries to be a part of the project in order to reduce the time required for marketing of the project. This eventually helps customers save a lot of time. Additionally, the app tool provided by the company helps customers to build a dashboard within a few hours for any participants of the project. It is very simple to integrate thethings.iO with ERPs and CRMs of the customers. The company thrives on the goal of simplifying the adoption of IoT. Therefore, rather than developing a new interface and tools for the customers, it tries to integrate its product with any CRM such as SAP, Salesforce, Siebel, among others.
Rising Challenges
Nowadays IoT solution providers are facing a problem, mainly due to the adoption speed of the customers. IoT is not always about the latest technology. It is also a business model that makes or saves money for the concerned company who is implementing the project. Technically, customers are mostly interested in edge computing and security. When it comes to edge computing, it depends on the hardware and the budget of the project and when it comes to security, the company always tries to provide all the knowledge on security that helps to secure an IoT device from the first day.
Future that Looks Promising
thethings.iO thinks that its customers need to go step by step when it comes to implementing IoT. The first step would be connecting a device. Second is making a deep analysis of the data and third is to make devices to interact with each other. After the third step, the last two steps are applying AI algorithm and integration with CRMs and internal services which will eventually help to create an innovative and profitable business model.
thethings.iO will continue to help any company with all these steps, executing it themselves or finding the best partner for the project all around the world.
