IoT platform types and common features

Business strategy and customers determine how to structure your IoT platform content.

The Internet of Things is the product of the combination of IT and OT. Any IT-centric definition cannot describe the importance of OT, and vice versa. In this article, I will share with you the practical experience of how customers from different industries use the Internet of Things platform.

IoT Platform Types

• Industry platform: mainly has specific functions in vertical fields, such as industrial equipment performance and asset management, medical services for monitoring patients, logistics and transportation platforms, etc.
• Business operation platform: mainly a dedicated business function platform. The most common function is to provide support and maintenance or management services.
• City management platform: Cities want to optimize city operations and citizen services. These services mainly include: parking, lighting, garbage collection, etc. Therefore, IT in the city service platform (or city digital platform) can manage the city's OT assets.
• Pure software platforms or data platforms: These platforms are the typical "Internet of Things platforms" often mentioned. Their main function is to collect data from devices and transmit it to business systems or personnel, perform analysis and workflow integration.
• Software and hardware platform: If you are using ICT hardware and software (e.g. networking or telecommunications equipment in addition to the software mentioned above), then your platform is a complex and you can add OT hardware (industrial equipment, medical systems, etc.) to the platform and consider it as part of the main IoT platform.

Universal Platform

If we put all the above platforms together to draw a picture, it would look like this:

It is an IT + OT platform, rather than a platform based on ICT components.

The platform changes are mainly achieved by excluding the OT layer from the above physical layer, or limiting only the software content.

Common features of the platform

If we take the hardware, network connectivity challenges, and OT systems out of the equation, we end up with a typical IoT software platform (or IoT data platform).

It looks like this:

It can implement higher-level business functions or operational tasks. Each task described in the above figure can be regarded as its own "platform", such as an asset management platform or a service assurance platform.

These changes are based on specific tasks in the following five core functions of the IoT software layer:

• Connectivity: ensuring two-way data exchange between devices and other systems for device configuration or management;
• Collection: Collect and manage data generated by devices.
• Analysis: Perform complex analysis or AI technology analysis on dynamic and static data in the system;
• Integration: Obtain actionable information from data and feed it back into the enterprise workflow (full automation or augmented human effort, etc.); disclose data or provide services to third parties through APIs;
• Apply: Deliver data to people (e.g. notifications, dashboards, approval chains, etc.) so they can act on the data.

However, this is easier said than done, and making the above a reality requires many complex intermediate processes.

How to build?

Fortunately, we do not need to create and build these functions from scratch. Various PaaS products are already mature and we can use them to build our own business platform. The main trick is to identify the core content and optimize the construction and operation costs.

Summarize

Solutions vary, and so do IoT platforms.

Your business strategy and the services you provide to your customers determine how you define what an IoT platform is. You can then wisely choose the right components from your IoT platform.