A Data-Driven Approach

IoT value is all about using data to gain insights and take action. We designed Octave from the ground up to make your asset data accessible and actionable, so you can get to those insights more quickly and easily.

The platform does that by providing comprehensive, integrated tools across the four key areas of IoT connectivity:

Extract: Retrieve and normalize data events from diverse, unstructured raw inputs—even from complex pieces of industrial or medical machinery that previously required specialized expertise to address. Octave empowers you to run a full suite of protocol drivers and interfaces for all southbound edge devices and assets you want to integrate and allows you to fully configure and deploy them from the cloud. For the first time, you can easily access data from industrial sensors, Modbus registers or 8-bit microprocessors without having to build a custom integration on the embedded side.

Orchestrate: Octave provides a messaging system to publish and subscribe to streams of data, so you can always have the right data, at the right time, with the right priority, delivered to the right system of record. You can balance different priorities, destinations, devices and systems of record. And you can evolve your data management as your services, customers and markets change.

Act: Octave gives you the tools to process, modify and take action on the data you collect, both at the edge and in the cloud. Actions can include forwarding data to cloud infrastructure, triggering alerts or calling third-party APIs. Octave also makes it much easier to manage the long deployment lifecycles of IoT systems.

Secure: Most organizations don’t need or want to become experts in protocol security, network security or brokering trusted relationships between edge devices and the cloud. They just want a way to securely deposit data at the edge and retrieve it from the cloud. When you work with Octave, the platform handles all aspects of managing credentials, checking authenticity and securing communications. Your developers can focus on driving IoT value, not securing IoT infrastructure.

Let’s drill down into some of the specific capabilities that Octave delivers across these four key areas of IoT data.

Data-driven Capabilities

Extract

Ready to Connect to Cellular Devices

Scale from prototype to production with certified hardware that connects out of the box

Global Cellular LPWAN Coverage

Connect low power devices anywhere

Edge Resources

Extract data from sensors, automation protocols, and serial bus interfaces

Orchestrate

Steam Router

Publish and subscribe to filtered streams of data events

Event Engine

Buffer, filter, correlate, store, and forward readings from your edge resources

Device Blueprints

Clone and replicate device properties and behavior on a massive scale

Act

Action Runner

Process, analyze, and act on data at the edge and in the cloud with a common JavaScript framework

Fleet Management Console

Monitor, control, update and maintain your connected devices

Data Tunnel

Secure remote inbound access to your connected assets on demand

Cloud Integrations

Seamlessly package, enrich and connect your data to your cloud services applications

Secure

Data Vault

Deposit data at the edge and retrieve from the cloud, using our managed security infrastructure

Adaptive Security

Ongoing mitigation of security threats fro the duration of your deployment

IoT value is all about using data to gain insights and take action

Simplify Data ExtractionThe major weakness of many existing IoT platforms and strategies is an underlying assumption that data is easy to acquire. In practice, organizations have struggled to find a one-size-fits-all solution for heterogeneous edge environments. Octave makes data extraction simpler by providing:

Edge resources: There are thousands of different types of assets that organizations might want to connect, but the approach to connecting them will fall into one of just a few categories. You could, for example, need to connect to a controller that receives input from sensors or actuators via serial communications or a protocol driver. Or, you might need to connect to an external or onboard sensor or actuator itself. In all cases, Octave provides simple-to-use tools—all running on the device but configurable from the cloud—that make deployment much faster and easier.

Ready-to-Connect cellular devices: Octave edge devices ship with the subscriber identity module (SIM) already tested, certified and logically embedded in the device. Plug the device in, and it will connect to the cellular network. As a result, you can go from early-stage prototype to full-scale IoT solution much more quickly. Get your prototype working the way you want, and you can swing into a production environment with hardware that’s already certified and connected, without changing anything in your design or hardware approach.

Global cellular LPWAN coverage: With our industry-leading LPWA and Smart SIM technologies, you can deploy highly efficient LPWA devices and connect them practically anywhere.

Easily Orchestrate Your Data ModelOctave provides all the orchestration tools and intelligence your developers need to design and control your IoT application logic. These include:

Observations: The Observation Engine acts as a flexible, fully configurable “mail room” for managing and prioritizing asset data. It provides the intelligence to buffer, filter, correlate, store and forward readings from edge devices so that you have exactly the data you need, exactly when you need it.

Event Streams: Once asset data has been correlated or forwarded, Octave provides tools to easily assemble it into “event streams,” the organizing unit for managing IoT data in the cloud. Unlike conventional IoT solutions that limit developers to inflexible, even hardcoded logic, Octave allows developers to publish and subscribe to whichever filtered streams make sense for a given purpose. They can easily change this logic to refine or expand the application.

Device Blueprints: Device blueprints function like configuration templates, allowing developers to easily replicate properties and behaviors from one device to another or to many devices at once. Unlike basic config templates, however, Octave’s device blueprints are developer-friendly. Developers can capture full history logs, revert back to previous blueprints and easily clone device attributes at a massive scale.

Take Action on Your DataOctave includes a full suite of tools and features to take a variety of actions in response to IoT data, in a multitude of ways. And, unlike with any other IoT platform, developers can implement diverse actions using the same toolchain—across both edge and cloud. Octave provides:

Action Runner: You can implement and continually update logic for your IoT application—combining data from edge, cloud and third-party sources in myriad ways. Developers can define precisely how the application processes and acts on data both in the cloud and at the resource-constrained edge—all using a familiar JavaScript framework.

Management Console: Octave includes a single interface to monitor, control, update and maintain your connected devices—including the lifecycle of the devices themselves, as well as their SIM connectivity.

Data Tunnel: The success of many real-world IoT applications, especially asset monitoring, depends on efficient connectivity not just from device to cloud, but the reverse—sending data or commands down to the edge device. Octave provides a secure, lightweight, on-demand mechanism for inbound communication to remote assets.

Cloud Integrations: Octave makes it fast and easy to package, enrich and connect your IoT data to systems of record deployed in practically any cloud service or application, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Solar Lighting Company Launches Telemetry Service

One of the world’s leading providers of solar-powered lighting for infrastructure wanted to reimagine its business model. The company makes everything from marine buoys to school crosswalk traffic beacons, but was relying solely on one-time equipment sales. Company leaders wanted to add connectivity to their equipment and offer ongoing telemetry as a service.
Under the traditional IoT model, launching one pilot, for one product, would have meant contracting with multiple vendors to address all the elements involved (device, network, cloud, security). Just assembling a field trial would have taken six months. From there to a commercially viable application would likely take another year. With Octave, the company worked with just one vendor and moved from conception to launch in a few months.
The company also now has broad flexibility in the IoT business models it can support. For example, they can offer different tiers of telemetry services, from basic reports to dashboards to API-based integration with asset management systems. Octave will support all these cases and allow the company to easily change the data behavior as needed. They can also shift from the edge gateways used in the pilot to lower-cost embedded modules as they scale out across their portfolio. When they do, they won’t have to recode anything; everything designed for the prototype will translate to large-scale commercial launch.

Industrial Paint Company Shifts to Consumption-Based Business

A leading manufacturer of paint and chemical coatings for the auto industry wanted to improve cash flow by shifting to a pay-as-you-go revenue model. The company previously shipped containers of its products to customers on consignment, often not receiving payment until months later. By adding connectivity to the containers, they could track when a cannister was opened and immediately invoice.

The company turned to its IT partner, a global enterprise systems integrator, to build the IoT pilot. But, while the integrator had expertise in cloud and back-end software development, they had no experience with embedded devices or IoT edge communications. After learning about Octave, the IT integrator realized it was exactly what they needed.

With Octave, the developers can build a secure, fully functional IoT application using the Javascript toolchain they already know. They don’t have to worry about the rest of the data stack, edge intelligence or embedded connectivity. Instead, they can quickly take the idea from conception to pilot, and then from pilot to large-scale production, using their existing skill set. Coverage, security, data orchestration—everything is already in place.

Security Made SimpleThe major challenge in IoT security is not figuring out what to do; you can find countless papers on security best practices. The challenge is that implementing security in real-world IoT installations is still hugely complex. With Octave, the platform handles all of that complexity. We broker a trusted relationship between edge and cloud. We ensure that no data is accepted from or sent to unauthenticated sources or destinations. Your developers get a system with built-in trust, so they can focus on building great applications instead of reinventing security infrastructure. Key Octave security capabilities include:

Data Vault: Octave makes securely transmitting IoT data as easy as depositing money in your bank account. The platform handles everything needed to establish a trusted relationship between edge devices and the system of record in the cloud, using proven security measures to ensure that data is not lost or altered.

Adaptive Security: Octave treats security as a dynamic component that is managed, maintained and updated on an ongoing basis. For as long as you use the platform, Sierra Wireless will continuously upgrade edge firmware, rotate encryption keys, constantly monitor the network for threats and more as an integrated part of the solution.