The overall winner of the inaugural Mind2Machine (M2M) Challenge, Adroit Technologies, says its solution is built on the Remoteworx M2M Platform, powered by the MTN Business IOT platform, which is designed to cut time and cost out of the M2M development process.
The winning solution monitors, controls and manages a geographically distributed set of mobile and fixed generator sites by inspecting power, fuel and alarm systems of the generators. It was judged the winner over 49 innovative entries in the first M2M Challenge, sponsored by MTN, Intel and the Innovation Hub.
Dave Wibberley, MD of Adroit Technologies, says the app illustrates the way in which Adroit's platform can help to fast-track IOT development: "Some clever re-architecting of our software allowed us to build a platform that we can deliver into the industry for them to build on, saving them a great deal of development work."
Wibberley explains the software platform has a communications capability that supports communication to devices in the field. Developers can embed the software into their own devices to enable the communication between the device and the cloud. "We aim to integrate our platform with MTN's platform, so that while you are monitoring the device, you can at the same time control the SIM and the data management side of things. In M2M development, the hard work lies in getting the communications right, and once you have the data up there, then to be able to build a solution that represents what you're trying to do fairly easily, without having to recode or code from scratch. Our software allows you to build a representation of that data."
The solution will give local developers a 'foot up', he says. "We know the complicated thing is the communications. It's not as simple as just taking data from the field and pushing it up to something over a network. What you need to be able to deal with is the challenges of the real-time world - networks aren't always up. What do you do with the data when the networks aren't up? You need to go and restore the data. Largely, a lot of these solutions are exception-based. What you need is to be able to identify problems with an alert, and then go and fix the problem. Our solution allows for that, so it has taken away a massive amount of headaches by building that secure infrastructure so developers can plug into that software."
Adroit, which is partially owned by Mitsubishi Electric of Japan, has been in the business of real-time software for the industrial automation market for more than 25 years. "We export our software to 16 countries in five continents, and M2M communications and building software solutions are in our DNA," Wibberley says.
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