The internet of things (IoT) keeps growing—with projections of $10-plus trillion market potential over the next decade—and Adventech, a global provider of industrial computing products and services, is trying to help systems integrators get their share of the expanding pie.
The company recently launched the WISE-PaaS (which stands for “Wireless IoT Solutions Embedded-Platform as a Service”) Marketplace, a portal with consolidated access to the company’s software solutions for IoT.
As it exists now, the marketplace offers integrators with a suite of software tools to implement IoT solutions using Advantech’s extensive breadth of computing products and sensors, as well as sensors from companies like Texas Instruments and Bosch. But the goal of the marketplace is to eventually enable integrators to sell their own tailor-made services directly to clients.
These offerings, available now, utilize partnerships with companies like Microsoft, Acronis, Intel Security-McAfee, and ARM mbed to tailor solutions for a range of applications, from industrial automation to web-based digital signage content management.
“For the most part, the idea is to create a marketplace that is interactive, and is not only for our customers to utilize their services, but actually feed back and create their own section,” said Charlie Wu, product manager at Advantech. “We are providing our target customer with quick and easy access to our IoT software; that’s the basic idea for now. And down the road, we’re planning on making it interactive, so once customers finish, they can actually put their product on our marketplace and other customers can also utilize their products.”
Currently, the IoT software services on the marketplace cover three categories: cloud services, security services, and platform services. Among the latter category, Advantech offers WISE-PaaS/RMM, a cloud-based, remote system-monitoring tool; WebAccess/IMM, a cloud-based digital signage content platform; and WebAccess/SCADA, an application software program related to industrial automation.
According to Wu, Advantech has been providing some of these services for a while, but it has recently revamped them and streamlined the way they are presented to customers. “The demand has always been there,” he said. “The way I look at it, IoT is integrating and advancing from what we already have. So when you look at some of the services, like the WISE-PaaS/RMM, WebAccess/SCADA, those are already things that we provided previously under a different name. So we’re using the WISE-SaaS Marketplace to integrate the company’s resources into one website to allow our customers easy access to easily find what they need.”
In summary, Wu said that the marketplace helps fulfill Advantech’s goal of providing a comprehensive source for all things IoT. “Overall, this is a good marketplace that offers both the software tools that we provide, and can also link to different kinds of hardware solutions that we provide,” he said. “The idea is to create a total solution for the customer to create their own IoT network.”
