TruConnect by Truminds - Transforming Insights into True Actions

Background

Truminds’ IoT and Big Data Analytics platform, TruConnect is one of its most advanced offerings today that helps customers go from data to insights to actions with minimum effort and maximum value. When we started off, the initial scope was to be able to connect the monitoring devices to incoming vehicles and view vehicle diagnostic data. This was then expanded to have the ability to send diagnostic commands to the vehicle and store the response data to enable better servicing and repairs. We soon realized that there was a huge untapped potential for feature expansion and multiple use-cases in this solution. This was when TruConnect really took off.

Initial Vision And Enrichment

Based on our experience with the first version of the application, we redesigned TruConnect to serve more as a framework than a product, as a framework could support different domains and different customer requirements. We envisioned it as a system which would connect to devices at one end, ingest and process their data and expose the raw/processed data to the customer at the other end, allowing them to visualize it and glean insights from the same. This would make it a complete end-to-end, data-to-action solution.

As we developed TruConnect to be feature-rich and more generalized, we serviced multiple industries and use cases with it. These ranged from servicing customer use cases in the automotive, satellite, construction, semiconductor, aviation industries to name a few, essentially what we popularly call Industry 4.0. These wide range of solutions we have built with this framework is a testimony to the vision and robustness of TruConnect.

At its core, TruConnect consists of three components:

1. TruConnect Edge: Data ingestion pipeline which collects raw data from the devices
2. TruConnect Cloud: Cloud storage layer which stores the raw and processed data
3. TruConnect Actions: Customer-facing visualization framework which allows them to visualize the data in a variety of ways best suited to derive insights from. These insights are then used to arrive at and implement corrective actions.

Today, TruConnect is capable of handling multi-tenant data to ensure data privacy for customers. It can be configured via metadata-based configuration, thus cutting down deployment and turnaround time. It has inbuilt support for TruIAM (Truminds Identity and Access Management) to eliminate unauthorized access to your data and systems. TruConnectEdge serves as an interface between the cloud (TruConnect Cloud) and the actual hardware devices and can work with third-party device vendors to enable support for newer hardware.

Technology

On the technology front, time-series databases are used to ingest, process and store real-time data. The visualization framework is created using the market leading React framework for ease of use and rich functionality. Two-way TLS handshakes and session-based authentication models are used to ensure that no unauthorized devices are able to connect to the network. Truminds offers an unbeatable combination of technical excellence and domain expertise to ensure minimal turnaround times, both for initial implementation and further enhancements.

What’s Next

Vendor lock-in is a genuine concern for many businesses today, which Truminds is aware of. We have already done an implementation of TruConnect which supported a customer’s choice of cloud stack (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.). In the near future, TruConnect will support serverless or cloud-specific implementations out of the box. This will allow customers to then have their own team (or any other vendor) to take care of the maintenance of the system. This will make TruConnect truly as one of the most powerful and flexible IoT platforms available in the market.