Netshield South Africa is pleased to unveil its end-to-end IoT (Internet of Things) solution, assisting customers with the development, management and deployment of successful IoT implementations, from sensors, through to the gateways, dashboards and analytics.

As a local OEM of IoT intelligent gateways and sensors (amongst others), Netshield has identified a need by customers to deploy effective IoT environments that extend the full implementation and management of the solution. Drawing from its own development of IoT components and offerings, the company has partnered with myriad vendors to pull together tailor-made IoT systems that meet a variety of customer needs.

“So many companies already have parts of an IoT environment already installed in their business, but are unable to pull these together to get the full benefit from the data derived from them,” states Inus Dreckmeyr, CEO at Netshield South Africa. “What we have done is use our experience and knowledge of IoT to bring together partnerships that offer customers a full end-to-end IoT experience, without the need to get multiple vendors and suppliers involved, and that comes in at a fraction of the cost.

“The reality is that there are so many companies ready to receive millions of packets of data from their IoT sensors, they have an IoT gateway setup, they may even have the analytics in place, but they are unable to pull it all together. It is a costly lost opportunity.”

The Netshield offering is not built on the promise of one vendor. Instead the company is able to assist organisations with a greenfields site to develop a solution from scratch, or clients with an ineffective solution already in place to reap the benefits of their investment by adding just a few components into their environment. The company has partnered with bandwidth providers, cloud IoT gateway suppliers, storage organisations, software houses and analytics solutions, which when coupled with its own monitoring and control solutions, dashboards, intelligent gateways and sensors - provide a holistic answer to a customer’s IoT needs.

Notable vendor partnerships the company has already bedded down include: IBM, SAP and Microsoft, as well as a host of cloud providers and a number of component suppliers.

Ultimately an IoT environment is made up of components from multiple sources, but to get these to talk to each other is a fairly complex exercise. Each layer of the environment needs to communicate through its own gateway to the next layer’s gateway. For example the data from the sensors need to be relayed to the cloud gateway, that then needs to be relayed to the storage environment or the software environment where the analytics magic happens, and all of it needs to be viewed through a single dashboard.

Now picture that there is a new vendor or OEM at every step of the process and you are then required to pool these systems to create a seamless view of your IoT?

“Unless this process is properly managed and controlled you will never get an accurate view of the data collected and ultimately you will not be able to conduct the analytics that is the ultimate promise of IoT. We are helping customers solve this by introducing intelligent gateways into the process that can ensure the delivery of the data through each stage, as well as creating the partnerships needed to facilitate it, and then offering customers a single dashboard to view, monitor and control the process,” adds Dreckmeyr.

The Netshield intelligent IoT gateways are fairly unique in that they don’t rely on constant connectivity in order to perform their functions, even if connectivity is lost they can continue the process themselves. In addition, the systems are able to provide monitoring and remote control, enabling customers to control and command sensors and the like remotely.

“By packaging IoT solutions we remove complexity and simplify the process. Our customers can log into an app, type in an IP address, and immediately see what is going on. It has been simplified to such an extent that it will take less than 15 minutes to train someone in a call centre to operate, and then help a technician in a field.

“IoT is failing on its promise, and is in many instances becoming just another solution no one understands, with a dashboard no one can work with, and as a result technical teams are unable to get the information they need from it. Our promise is to provide the simplicity, with a single layered OEM approach, and offer a solution that can be 100% tailor-made to a volume customer. We are also willing to get into partnerships with our customers and are willing to sign a long-term working relationship agreement with them – because we have evidenced what can be done with IoT environments that work, and we have confidence in the solution we have built,” he ends.