Types of IoT Platforms

In my previous post, we talked about what is an IoT platform. Here let’s try to understand the different types of IoT platforms. For continuity, let’s have a quick recap. An IoT platform is a type of middleware, acting as a mediator between hardware (devices or sources of data) and various IoT application layers.

Given the heterogeneous nature of IoT environments, an IoT platform enables the integration of applications, sensors, legacy equipment, and network infrastructure devices. Platforms work behind the scenes to enable application functionality, data flows, and secure & scalable communication within the entire IoT ecosystem.

Features of IoT platforms may vary significantly, however they provide certain common core capabilities:

• Connect devices, sensors, and machines to the edge devices or directly to the cloud
• Support device connectivity with multiple communications protocols
• Secure devices, data, and networks
• Store and analyze data from multiple sources and produce visualization and insights to drive business decisions.
• Integrate IoT applications with enterprise business applications like ERP, inventory management, CRMs, supply chain management systems, Logistics systems, and so on.

There are different types of IoT platforms that are available in the market today. We will discuss a few of them:

Connectivity Management platform

One of the most basic, but popular IoT platform is connectivity management. These types of platforms enable connectivity orchestration, connectivity management, and communication services for IoT devices and systems. Connectivity management platforms will enable capabilities such as:

• Connectivity management
• Invoicing/billing management
• Connectivity between data sources and servers
• Data rate management

Device Management Platform

The number of devices and other assets gets connected in an IoT system is growing. This growing number of devices poses many challenges in an IoT ecosystem.  These devices are to be maintained over a longer period of time and hence device management platforms have established themselves as a standalone product over the years. A complete device management platform should enable the following capabilities:

• Provisioning and configuration of devices
• Device authentication
• Remote device monitoring, control, and management
• Over the air (OTA) administration and updates
• Software updates
• Security patching
• Troubleshooting

Analytics Platform

The real benefit from an IoT application will be achieved when we are able to make sense out of the data collected. A robust analytics engine takes care of the processing of data volumes and uses advanced AI & ML models. The analytics platform will cater to required storage capacities for the massive data volume involving both structured and unstructured data.

The key capabilities of IoT analytics platforms are:

• IoT data collection via compatible communication protocols
• Data processing, including collection, aggregation, harmonization, transportation to the cloud, and data storage for historian usage
• Computation of derived parameters (Key performance indicators) from the base parameter data received
• Scalable data storage clusters for accommodating the structured and unstructured data
• Flexible rules engine to define various anomaly and alert conditions based on base parameter data and or derived parameters
• Advanced-Data analytics capabilities involving AI & ML engines that derive insights, patterns, critical relationships, etc.
• Flexible visualization and reporting tools to generate customized dashboards and reports

Application Platforms

Application platforms enable the development of custom IoT solutions with a focus on data analytics and insight generation. These platforms will have built-in application components and standard interfaces to other enterprise systems. Key functionalities of an application platform will include:

• Rule engines
• Highly customizable data visualization tools
• Abstraction of the underlying infrastructure

IoT Development Platform

Certain IoT platforms provide features that improve the developer experience and provide services that make the development of applications easy for developers. Development-centric platforms usually put emphasis on community-building and collaboration. Some of the capabilities of developer-focused IoT platforms are:

• OTA application development in a cloud IDE
• Live development and deployment of IoT apps
• Integrations with external repositories such as GitHub & GitLab
• IoT app marketplace
• Collaborative & community features

End-to-End IoT Platform

End-to-end IoT platforms are a full-stack platform that consolidates and performs all services across the IoT value chain. These platforms are to be robust enough to handle large-scale industrial IoT solutions. However, these platforms are to be flexible and open to allow for third-party integrations and future developments.

As we have seen that the IoT Platform landscape is very complex. The boundaries between them are not clear-cut. You would come across platforms that provide multiple combinations of the types we discussed above. Since the choices and possibilities are varied, the primary decision drivers influencing your selection of an IoT platform should be your business requirements, IoT roadmap, and digital strategy.