IoT83's Advanced Application Enablement Platform, the OEDC

My colleagues at IoT83 have been publishing a host of great articles to help guide industrial OEMs and Enterprises in their IIoT and AI journeys, but we have not published a LinkedIn guide about our IIoT Application Creation & Deployment Platform itself in quite some time.

This article is to remedy that with a to-the-point overview of why we believe our OEM & Enterprise Domain Cloud (OEDC) platform is the best solution for industrial OEMs and Enterprises for their long term and sustained IIoT and AI success!

Background: Why We Do What We Do the Way We Do It

At IoT83, we have worked with industrial OEMs and Enterprises for a long time. We understand their need for enterprise-grade solutions that meet strict cyber-security, reliability, and scalability requirements, but also their need for flexibility in how the applications they build and take to market actually work to give industrial operators the maximum benefit possible.

From the start, we have understood that what they need from the “IoT Ecosystem” is a solution that provides them with a very solid “IIoT Platform” as a foundation, but also a very flexible set of templates, tools, and workflows to accelerate the creation of applications that are customized and tuned to their specialized requirements. But this need for a “stable platform” and the need for more or less “unbounded flexibility” is a technology contradiction that the ecosystem – up to now – did not provide.

Resolving this conflict between sustained stability and unbounded flexibility has been our central goal at IoT83 from the start. Now, with the OEDC, the 6th iteration of our platform, we have achieved this goal to unprecedented levels. This article tells you how.

IoT83’s Place in the IIoT Ecosystem

At IoT83, we are all about IIoT Application and Solution Creation. While we have in-depth knowledge of Smart Edge solutions, we believe an OEM’s ownership of their edge solutions is essential to long-term success. Only the OEM has sufficient intimate familiarity their products, and ultimately the “Smart Edge” technology is an integral piece of the OEM’s products themselves. As such, this is a core element of their long-term IIoT enablement and success, which they should own. A simplified diagram of an OEM’s Smart Edge alternatives -from the simple to the advanced - is shown below:

So where the OEM’s Smart Edge solution - with edge asset sensor data, device telemetry, edge APIs, and secure protocol connectivity – ends, we begin. Our place in this ecosystem is to simplify the aggregation of diverse OEM data from various device and asset types, and to transform this IIoT data into enterprise-grade, smart and sophisticated IIoT applications and solutions. A high-level view of our place in the ecosystem is illustrated as follows:

Using our OEDC platform, with its highly reliable big-data core services as the foundation, OEMs teams can use our existing applications as catalyst code, along with easy-to-understand SDKs, templates, and workflows to quickly build, deploy, manage, and scale, powerful custom solutions.

To better understand how we do this and the OEDC differentiation, let’s take a quick look at the evolution of IIoT Platforms over time.

The Evolution of IIoT Platforms – Leading to the OEDC

As can be seen from the diagram below, IIoT platforms have evolved significantly.

In the diagram, you can see that the motivation for each evolution is market-driven by problems or shortcomings of the prior method. So, the very high cost of the early “Mega IIoT” solutions from multinationals motivated the introduction and early popularity of IoT-as-a-Service solutions. But as the cost, time, and specialty skills needed to build customer-ready and scalable solutions using IoTaaS became clearer, the ecosystem began to provide solutions using Low-Code RAD (Rapid Application Development) methods to build IIoT solutions. While these solutions do produce IoT applications at lower cost and time to market, these systems were found to be very limited in flexibility and using them resulted in supplier lock-in. Taking all of this into account fully validates this next step in the IIoT ecosystem - the Advanced Application Enablement Platform solution, or the OEDC.

The IoT83 OEDC was built leveraging the best value creation concepts of prior generations but carefully constructed to overcome their limitations. Before we proceed to describe the platform, let’s look at one more chart that brings this ecosystem evolution home.

This diagram shows the costs to build enterprise grade applications using these different platform types on the vertical axis, with the progression of required feature depth and platform capabilities on the horizontal axis.

Here we again see the first generation or “mega” IIoT platforms as being both the most costly and feature rich, but again, these are also highly inflexible. We see the IoTaaS “value curve” next, with its more or less infinitely scalable potential, but at very high costs as platform capability requirements grow. On the lower left, we see the “Low-Code RAD” solutions with their lower cost, but limited expansion and flexibility capabilities. But the latest generation Application Enablement Platform, the OEDC, provides a breakthrough in time and cost to value delivery that is truly disruptive.

This is accomplished in several ways. First the OEDC provides all of the capabilities that a platform designer would normally use from an IoTaaS set of offerings, but already integrated into a working set of well documented core platform services, complete with easy to use SDKs and APIs. Second, the OEDC comes with pre-built applications that contain the essential “design patterns” of IIoT such as Device Monitoring, Remote Device Management, Rule Generation, Notifications, Predictive Maintenance, AI/ML workflows, and much more. And, the OEDC also includes a low-code data to dashboarding analytics application that enriches any custom built application using the other elements of the system. Finally, the OEDC provides an application to help OEMs manage the licensing and deployment of the applications they create for their customers.

An Overview of the OEDC Platform

The OEDC platform capabilities outlined above are more fully described here. Below is a diagram showing how each of these elements of the total solution work together. Start at the bottom, and work your way up for the best understanding.

By using all of these elements of the OEDC, OEMs and Enterprises actually have control over an Application Creation and Deployment Factory. The OEDC Platform itself has been proven scalable, secure, and reliable to over 50M+ connected devices. Also, the Application Construction approach optimizes the conflicting goals of simplicity with application creation power that we discussed earlier, and the IoT83 OEDC is Cloud platform independent (AWS, Azure, Private Cloud, Appliance), so it can be deployed anywhere. Finally, as the OEDC is built for multi-tenant, multi-application use, the Platform allows application deployments wherever they are needed in a customer’s industrial environments.

The OEDC Platform Core Services

The OEDC Platform Core Services are the foundation of the OEDC Platform and are used in all IoT83 IIoT Applications, whether directly, by developers using the SDKs and secure APIs to include them in new applications, or indirectly, by using the provided Asset Handler, Data Handler, and Centralized Account Management applications provided. These Core Services are an extensive collection of middleware components that can be used to build virtually any IIoT solution. The services available today include Extensive Connector Services, Data Transformation Tools, Dynamic Dash-boarding, Storage (Multi Db) Services, Data Migration Tools, Analytics (with AI & ML), Rules & Notifications, Scheduler & Event Services, IAM/RBAC Services, Tenant Management Tools, Application White Labeling, Account Management, Key Management Services, AEP Back-End Services, and many more. And the team at IoT83 continues to update the set of Core Platform Services with every new release.

By way of example, the diagram below highlights just some of the capabilities provided in the OEDC Asset Handler, and each of these application components are constructed by using the provided SDKs which call the Core Service APIs. The powerful advantage of this is that the number of new lines of code needed to build any application component is dramatically reduced.

And because the volume of new lines of code is directly proportional to program cost, risk, time to market, and maintainability, this is a huge differentiator of the OEDC, separating it from other alternatives in the IIoT Platform Ecosystem.

To bring home this point, to build a new application component from scratch, a developer might write 2,000 lines of code, whereas to build the same component using the OEDC the developer may write 300 lines of code to build the specific dimensions of the component but use the OEDC Core Services for all the component “heavy lifting”.

Further, for IoT83 customers where they use our development services to build new applications, they pay only a fraction of what the application would nominally cost because, of course, we build their applications using this advanced methodology. The advantage of this cannot be overstated.

Finally, because the IoT83 OEDC Applications (Asset Handler and Data Handler) are built using the core services, where OEMs develop new applications on their own, they can not only reference the documentation help resources, but can also use these applications as catalyst for the creation of new full custom applications.

The Asset Handling Application

The OEDC Asset Handling Application is a feature rich IIoT and enterprise-grade IIoT application with all of the cyber security, reliability, and scalability that OEMs and Enterprises should expect for mission critical applications. And, as discussed above, the Asset Handler is built using the OEDC Core Platform Services and provides OEMs with IoT83’s best practices model to build specialized applications.

But, because most OEMs and Enterprises require customizations beyond any flexibility that can be pre-built into an application, the Asset Handler should be considered a “generic” application, where customizations can range from the very simple (changing the color palette, which is no-code configurable), to the relatively complex, such as adding in-dept custom business logic, analytics, and application-specific user interfaces.

Regardless, the Application Handler includes multiple advanced IIoT working services, such as Identity Access Management and role-based access control, data transformation tools, rule creation and management, actions on events, schedulers, and much more.

But beyond this, the Asset Handler provides complete and working IIoT key “design patterns” such as Asset Monitoring, Remote Asset Management, Predictive Maintenance, Advanced Service Management functions, AI/ML model integrations, platform monitoring, and more. These functions include both the back-end code (again, using the Platform Core Services), as well as the user interface front-end. The following diagram illustrates this:

By providing this complete, but “generic” framework, OEMs can quickly leverage the Asset Handler to rapidly build the specific functionality needed, again, using the highly efficient new lines of code to Core Services leverage described above.

One design philosophy of note with regards to the use of Low-Code and No-Code Asset Handler: at IoT83, we believe that using Low-Code and No-Code to build sophisticated applications is highly limiting. Where we see the real power of Low-Code and No-Code functionality is in using these tools to augment or enhance the functionality of an application. For example, in the completed application, operators can enhance the functionality of the application using Low-Code tools. Similarly, IAM or RBAC configuration can be managed using No-Code. But, these are more end-user tools, and not the tools needed to build an enterprise-grade application in and of themselves.

The Data Handling Application

The Data Handling Application is an example of specialized use of Low-Code and No-Code tools provided to end-users.

In effect, the Data Handler is a “Data to Dashboard” application that allows users to access virtually any data source using the Connector Studio, and then use the supplied Low-Code tools, “Lambda” function integration, ML model integration, and other tools to transform and operate on this data, and then to load this transformed data either back to source databases or to databases dedicated to the application.

Then, Drag and Drop Dashboards can be created using a “Click to Configure” interface, where users can build pages from a library of chart types and easily associate the relevant data to these charts. Finally, users can build stand-alone applications based on this data transformations by pushing the created dashboards into applications, and then establish end-user permissions to access the dashboards.

The Data Handler is a very powerful component of the OEDC solution, as once application data from end devices is available, end-users, from the very sophisticated to “citizen coders” can access, evaluate, analyze, transform the data and create powerful custom dashboards easily. Further, the Data Handler is a streamlined integration tool to allow combination of IIoT data with multiple enterprise data from multiple sources, such as Salesforce, AWS or Azure data stores, Oracle, Hadoop, SQL, or many others.

The Centralized Accounting Application

One thing that is often overlooked in the creation and management of enterprise grade IIoT solutions is to complexity of managing customer access to the applications as well as managing various application deployments. The Centralized Accounting Application Simplified Application Creation comes into play here and provides OEMs and Enterprises with per Account Go-To-Market application management.

The key components of the Application Manager are to 1) provide a Marketplace for all created applications that is viewable by customers where they can launch the applications they have license authorization to use; 2) to provide an easy to configure per Application / per customer Application License Management provisioning, which can be linked to back end billing or account management software; and 3) to provide the OEM with an easy to use customer deployment management for applications, which can be either cloud-based or on-premise, depending to customer and market needs.

The N M O matrix of devices to applications to customers shown below helps to highlight the value that this provides to application deployment and management.

Using the OEDC to Build Enterprise-Grade Applications

Bringing all of the OEDC together to build powerful IIoT applications, is a straightforward process as illustrated by the following diagram.

Initially, the core features and functionality of the planned application is identified. At IoT83, we always emphasize the importance of “incrementalism”, where initial applications should be important and of high business value but should not “boil the ocean”. Focus results in fast results, and once initial results are achieved, subsequent incremental adds to applications or creation of new solutions is far easier.

Also, new applications typically highly leverage the “generic” functions of the Asset Handler with initial modifications made as necessary to fit the uniqueness of the application. Again, by using the OEDC Platform Core Services model the new lines of code needed to make these “uniqueness” modifications is modest, and the program is primarily focused on any custom business logic or specialized analytics, and possibly the creation of unique end-user data presentation needed due to the nature of the products, analytics, or application itself. While the Asset Handler and Core Platform Services are well documented, some customers wish to use IoT83 development services to build their initial, and sometimes subsequent applications. As stated earlier, this is highly efficient, as these services use the OEDC methodology, and of course, our team is expert in this process.

Some IoT83 customers choose to build initial PoCs or MVPs directly using the Data Handler, due to its versatility and flexibility, validate these solutions with customers, and only then map this functionality into the highly portable and scalable Asset Handler framework.

And, once the full IIoT applications are created adding new value and insights using the streamlined workflows provided by the Data Handler allow independent analytics by different end-users, prototyping of new applications, or adding incremental value to running applications using the highly flexible and powerful tools the Data Handler provides.

Finally, OEMs and Enterprises can use the Centralized Account Manager to provide their marketplace of applications to customers, simplify customer access and licensing to customers, and to manage application deployments.

Summary

IoT83’s OEDC represents the next phase in the evolution of Application Enablement Platforms, and is one-of-a-kind in its versatility, flexibility, and power. By providing IoT83 customers with direct access to the underlying Platform Core Services, IoT83 is a very open and transparent system. These underlying services do all the “heavy lifting” for new application creation, and dramatically reduce the number of new lines of code that any new application will require, regardless of its sophistication, or its simplicity for that matter.

And, by providing the “generic”, but ready to use, Asset Handler as a best practices model for IIoT applications, already including the core “design patterns” needed in IIoT applications, the gap between planning an application and seeing it launched and deployed at scale is entirely transformed.

Finally, the Data Handler capabilities enable operators and end-users full access to the IIoT data and provides powerful tools to build new rule-based actions on events, analytics, data transforms, data dash-boarding, to build custom “mini-applications”, and to augment existing applications with new features and capabilities on the fly.

I hope this overview of IoT83’s OEDC Platform has piqued your interest and that you reach out for more information and a “test drive”.