Embedding IoT in well-established CRM solutions

In the early days of GSM, a new era in communications evolved that enabled wireless telephony and introduced new market potentials with world changing applications in consumer electronics. While early adopters and the wealthy segment of the world population were already satisfied with the new freedom offered through mobility and independence, research facilities followed up the new challenges provided by wireless communications soon after. A first goal at the early days of wireless communications was to lower production costs to make the new innovation available for the mainstream use.

At the time being, best-ranked universities - among others Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, KU and ETH - were tackling the challenges of higher bandwidth with improved quality-of-service (QoS) and publishing papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco to report the upcoming new world records in wireless communications. In the following years, a strong trade-off between signal bandwidth and quality in communication devices has been shown at ISSCC where only innovative architectures and novel solutions were able to push this trade-off to its physical limits.

In a timespan of only fifteen years, the kilobyte data-rate of GSM could be fully replaced by megabyte standards such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE). However, in the last two years, the market of mobile devices started to saturate while achieving around 5 billion of well-served subscribers in 2017 according to GSMA Intelligence. The saturation of the mobile market is an expecting fact since it goes hand-by-hand with the world’s population.

The reaction of the markets, however, pushed the researcher community as well as the communication industry to become creative and find new niche markets for wireless devices. Currently, a (new) hype in communications is evolving that is called the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which seems to have a similar revolutionary effect on the future mobile markets comparable to GSM telephony. With IoT, wireless technology is leaping beyond the wireless phone to connect the world continuously with the internet where - from home electronics to cars or doctor’s medical tablet – all potential devices are cross connected through the internet where data is stored in a cloud-based memory. With machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, IoT will further accelerate mobile opportunity and transform the way how people and economy interact. Based on the research of McKinsey & Company and Cisco, analysts predict that by 2025 the market of connected devices would be between 25 – 50 billion units.

The ecosystem of IoT is constantly growing and among others, Hivemind AG based in Zurich (Switzerland) is one of the companies leading the software research in providing full stack IoT solutions to serve its clients. Hivemind AG offers an innovative and powerful IoT platform (called OnePlatform) that connects devices to the internet with advanced cloud computing resources. It enables innovators and enterprises to rapidly develop and deploy smart and connected solutions for IoT applications. The platform basically features:

-       Analytics and intelligence

-       Multi-carrier integration

-       Sensor and device management

-       MQTT and HTTP gateway management

-       Dynamic payload parsing

-       Enterprise integration in the Skuid and Salesforce environments

-       RESTful API

Hivemind AG uses Skuid and Salesforce not only for fast prototyping, but sets them in practice as state-of-the-art integration platforms to allow its clients accessing advanced data visualization functionalities. Skuid is a cloud-based and user-experience platform for rapidly creating and engaging of optimized business applications across data repositories and online services. It gives clients the power to quickly iterate solutions within hours and not weeks. Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software solution for managing sales, services, marketing, collaboration, analytics, and building custom mobile apps. Both platforms, Skuid and Salesforce, are the enabler of current IoT applications and open new doors in development of agile and modular IoT platforms as it is the case for Hivemind’s OnePlatform.