The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of dedicated physical objects (things) that rely on an embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or with the external environment. The connecting of assets, processes and personnel enables the capture of data and events from which a company can learn behaviour and usage, react with preventive actions, or augment or transform business processes. The IoT is a fundamental capability for the creation of a digital business (Gartner 2017).
New Human-to-Things, Thing-to-Things and AI-to-Things business processes are needed to enable the digital business experience, in turn requiring a wide range of components to securely and reliably interact: sensors, data gateways, WLANs, WANs, business/service applications, Machine Learning and Deep Learning components.
The IoT platform abstracts common IoT functions from the business application logic and ensures that devices can easily and securely interact with applications and other device managing communication protocols (HTTP, WebSockets, MQTT, etc.), minimising the code footprint on devices and reducing network bandwidth requirements.
The IoT platform should potentially support billions of devices and trillions of messages, processing and routing them to business applications, to Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence and to other devices reliably and securely at any time, even when they are not connected. The IoT platform must manage, automatically and easily, the onboarding, organisation, monitoring, and remote governance of IoT devices appropriately scaled down, reducing the cost and effort of managing large IoT device deployments.
Most of the Industry 4.0 and Enterprise 4.0 applications also require significant computational power, data storage and complex analytics to be run at the “Edge” of the network. These business scenarios require the IoT platform to help sensors and data gateways facilitate the computing, messaging, data caching, synchronisation and machine language inference capabilities in a secure and governed way.
Hopefully, the public cloud will make it possible for Companies to activate such new capabilities in a PaaS scenario, thus allowing them to gradually develop and deploy IoT platforms according to their business strategy, aligning operational costs to the actual adoption pace of the new processes by customers, employees and devices, in continuously changing technical environments: IoT is a field where innovation happens daily and new sensors, connected products and services are released with astonishing speed.
PaaS IoT platforms benefit from very significant investments in order to make available the best, up-to-date features based on a pay-per-use formula, the ideal commercial approach for companies that want to develop, test and deploy new services and processes, leveraging the agile approach at its best.
Sense Reply has chosen the Amazon Web Services IoT Platform solution, leveraging the best PaaS IoT components available on the market to support its customer companies in successfully approaching the IoT transformation process.
In order to support the implementation of the Human-to-Things processes, in case companies do not want to leverage existing applications, the AWS PaaS solution can be complemented with the Salesforce.com SaaS, in which all the business processes requiring human interaction can be modelled. The native integration between the IoT Cloud component of Salesforce.com and AWS allow the two solutions to work seamlessly together as a single platform.
Additionally, Sense Reply has also chosen to include in its IoT reference architecture the Data Lake components provided by AWS PaaS solutions and the Machine Learning component. This is in order to enable a fully-featured IoT platform which can effectively support the development of all the IoT-related business processes in a fully pay-per-use scenario for both testing and deploying new processes, services and business models on a massive scale.
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Sense Reply assists clients in defining and aligning the overall IoT architecture to their business strategy and to the existing application portfolio, in selecting and testing the AWS and Salesforce.com PaaS/SaaS components and in setting the IoT processes and services implementation and roll-out strategy. Our Team also supports companies in choosing the ideal sensors and gateways, recommending state-of-the-art devices and scouting the market for innovations.
Sense Reply enables and configures the AWS and Salesforce.com components to deliver the IoT platform according to the IoT Architecture, integrating it into the existing company application portfolio.
Sense Reply designs and implements the Data Gateway software architecture, including any required protocol drivers, edge computing components and software orchestration feature, developing custom solutions and/or leveraging AWS components.
Sense Reply has delivered and tested the first fully-featured implementation in the world of the AWS Greengrass, enabling Edge Computing for an Industrial Data Gateway and of the AWS Orchestra, enabling the central governance of any Industrial Data Gateway software components through AWS features.
Sense Reply designs and implements Human-to-Things processes, leveraging the integration of the AWS platform with the company's existing application solutions. In order to deploy a fully new, flexible, powerful, scalable and cost-effective IoT architecture, we are able to integrate Salesforce.com with the AWS platform, thus unleashing the full potential to enable Human-to-Things and AI-to-human processes, and to reinvent the company's business model and services. Sense Reply has participated in the testing of the first implementation of the Salesforce.com/AWS connector in the world.
Sense Reply possesses the required expertise to enable Data Lake, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities on AWS, making available an extensive pay-per-use, IoT-Big Data-AI capability, as part of a model in which only the imagination can limit new, extremely powerful and cost-effective company capabilities.
Together with Reply Group Companies specialised in Cybersecurity, Sense Reply approaches every single aspect of the design and implementation of the IoT Platform and Architecture very carefully, taking into consideration the related security risks, as well as providing consulting services to help companies align their security policies to the new IoT scenario.