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Below is our recent interview with Alon Mantsur, CEO at DeviceTone:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to DeviceTone?
A: DeviceTone was established in 2018, after Cloud of Things began development of our platform in 2014, DeviceTone is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Boston, MA, U.S.A. We are privately held and work with enterprises, communications service providers, cloud service providers, and systems integrators.
DeviceTone offers a unique IoT operational platform and device management solution for enterprises and manufacturers, based on its patent-pending technology. The DeviceTone plug-and-play Edge-OS instantly connects any device to any cloud, making the device IoT ready within minutes.
We make IoT simple by providing an end to end IoT solution that can be used as a full-stack IoT platform while maintaining the flexibility to direct the data to any clouds and run on any hardware to fit any market needs.
• DeviceTone offers advanced end-to-end IoT software and service solutions to product manufacturers
• Our proven technology, built over the last several years, makes it easy to add digital services to consumer and commercial products
• Our solution is easily embedded into everyday products, enabling manufacturers and their distributors
• Our predictive maintenance, management, analytics, and messaging infrastructure enables product companies
to add recurring revenue services and build ongoing relationships with customers
• Our CloudSwitch software makes connectivity to any cloud or any number of clouds easy and efficient
• Our technology works with our own enterprise gateway or with nearly all other enterprise gateways
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Q: How do you make everyday products smart?
A: Our DeviceTone solution can be embedded into everyday products, enabling manufacturers and their distributors to offer management and maintenance services to consumers and businesses. Our embedded firmware package supports leading IoT standards, and our CloudSwitch technology stack enables smart products to communicate with any IoT cloud over any network protocol including LoRa, ULE, WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular.
By incorporating our firmware into heating and air conditioning products, refrigerators, water heaters, ovens, dishwashers, faucets and other home and commercial space end-points, companies who sell these products can extend their offerings, serving customers beyond the initial sale of the products with digital services, including predictive maintenance.
Q: Smart products are great – but how much real value do they deliver to consumers and businesses?
A: Smart products running on smart and secure networks deliver tremendous value to consumers and businesses – saving time through more conveniences, saving money through less consumption of energy and water, and even saving lives through applications designed to ensure safe, clean environments. Smart security systems provide peace of mind. Smart energy meters and HVAC systems provide significant reductions in costs.
Growth in connections of “things” is forecast to rise much faster than the growth of smartphones or tablets given the “perfect storm” of more ubiquitous and affordable broadband, less expensive components, cloud computing economics, and open APIs which are igniting creative applications in dozens of smart product categories.
We deliver real value to consumers and manufacturers:
Customer Benefits:
• Optimize energy consumption to provide hot
water adapted to each household’s need
• Receive alerts for predictive maintenance and
water damage prevention
• Save costs on home insurance
Manufacturer Benefits:
• Transform business model from a one-off product
sale to ongoing “hot water-as-a-service” platform
• Create a continuous relationship with customers
for predictive maintenance
• Increase customer satisfaction and retention
• Upsell and generate additional sales opportunities
Q: Could you explain how exactly does DeviceTone work? Can you provide some real-world use-cases?
A: The DeviceTone solution, working in concert with CloudSwitch technology, enables a truly end-to-end solution, from the edge to the experience, for consumer, business and enterprise level Smart Products and systems. With DeviceTone, our customers have developed feature-rich experiences and deep business insight for their connected products connected to cloud platforms without needing firmware skills.
DeviceTone is helping product companies roll out smart products with a rigorous technology stack, and an open approach, making it easy for all participants in the value chain to go farther, faster, with less cost and risk. By licensing our software and embedding our solutions into products, brands benefit from fast time to market, future-proof solutions and significant cost savings.
One of the world’s most successful and innovative kitchen design, manufacturing and installation companies, Howdens Joinery, based in the UK, contributes to nearly half a million kitchens a year. Howdens needed to bring connected kitchens to market securely, reliably, quickly, and affordable and chose the Cloud of Things IoT Gateway and DeviceTone solution. Today, Howdens has a centralized management system, making it easy to monitor, manage and maintain their high-end kitchen and laundry appliances, powered by Cloud of Things.
DeviceTone Edge provides the embedded control for Tondo’s wireless lighting solutions, making it faster for Tondo to get to market with future-proof and economically cost-effective lighting solutions. With DeviceTone’s integrated connected device management technology, Tondo gets the added benefit of remote secure management for every device they sell.
Another successful real-world use case is efficient restrooms. A large global manufacturer of restroom supplies for commercial deployments chose Cloud of Things to design and develop technology for water conservation and restroom supplies tracking. Cloud of Things solution helped them improve facility management by calculating the number of people using restrooms to notify improve cleaners accordingly, receive leak detection alerts to prevent water damage, receive empty soap dispenser hygiene alerts, schedule 24-hour hygiene flush, drive down water usage and costs by measuring consumption and reducing flooding and leakage.
Recommended: Q: What about CloudSwitch? Where does it fit into the system?
A: Our CloudSwitch technology stack enables smart products to communicate with any IoT cloud over any network protocol including LoRa, ULE, Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular. CloudSwitch technology directs data to any cloud or multiple clouds, drive down costs.
CloudSwitch is a module inside DeviceTone. It runs on IoT devices that we manage. CloudSwitch supports the leading IoT Cloud providers (i.e. AWS IoT, Azure IoT, GCP) and through DeviceTone cloud-based manager, administrators can decide, for each IoT device or group of devices, to which geographic location of that provider data should be streamed.
Behind the scenes, CloudSwitch is made from unique drivers that interact with the corresponding IoT Cloud APIs and enables us to make sure that our global customers can work with any provider and store data at any geographic location based on their operational and compliance requirements. While the solution might sound obvious, there are enormous engineering challenges when trying to program one layer to support the variety of providers, IoT devices and APIs out there.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Security and privacy in a world of an increasing number of connected things have become more complex and challenging than ever. One of the key security problems we aim to work on and researchers have cited with IoT devices is the impracticality of updating them when vulnerabilities are discovered. Installing new firmware on light bulbs or refrigerators is not something most consumers are used to, and many manufacturers haven’t contemplated those processes either. To resolve this we are trying to decouple the management control channel from the IoT data channel.
With flexible enough topology we offer our customers and partners a unique and powerful feature: the ability to decide, in real time, for each IoT device where to store its operational data.
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