The idea behind IoTify

The complexity of IoT ecosystem is intriguing and overwhelming. There are more than 2000 companies working on IoT ranging from early stage startups (like ours) till the top industry heavyweights. The sheer breadth and depth of this wide arena creates myriads of choices and plenty of confusion for IoT developers who are trying to build an overall solution. The newcomers to the ecosystem often feel intimidated by the volume of details while trying to make their way into this vast swarm of protocols, platforms and providers. Base upon our experience with talking to developers and vendors, we wanted to focus on a simple problem:-

How could we provide a frustration free IoT development experience?

We thought of following:-

Design an IoT developer kit:-

There are plenty already and it didn’t make sense to build one to join the bandwagon. Besides, every developer kit has to offer a compromise at some parameter. Should we have a built in WiFi or Ethernet adapter? Should it target industrial segment or hobbyist one? The prices of such kits are often a barrier to entry and with the availability of platforms such as Raspberry Pi Zero, there is hardly any room left for someone new to enter.

Another reason why we didn’t choose to develop hardware kit is because almost every hardware kit we have used ourselves ended up into shelf or storage after the initial enthusiasm die down. We have had a first hand experience of this in our lab and at the end it was a headache to store or dispose the redundant hardware. We ruled out this idea altogether.

Design another cloud platform:-

This could have been our best shot, just like many other startups who are trying to do the same. “You build hardware, we connect it to cloud” seems to be the latest marketing trend of these cloud platforms. However some serious thinking pointed out that the market is already overcrowded in this area. There are plethora of established player and competition is seriously challenging. The pricing is already close to zero and would soon become free. Besides, now there is a risky trend of the cloud vendors competing with the IoT platforms which are built on top of it. AWS for example is offering its own IoT suite and now it competes heads on with many IoT start-ups which are built upon its cloud. This seems to be a dangerous position to be into as we would never know when the ground below us could shake.

After all the brainstorming we went back to drawing board and started ideating again.

What is the real problem IOTIFY could solve without ending up as another guy in the race?

This is where idea of Internet of Virtual Things came out.

Internet of Virtual Things

We have witnessed virtualization as a game changer in server side. There were times when people used to build and maintain their own servers, get an IP address assigned from leased line operators. None of this is imaginable today. Solutions are rapidly migrating from server hardwares to datacenter. Compute, Storage and Networking are getting virtualized. However this trend has stopped trickling down to the bottom of IoT chain. While cloud and analytics are always virtual, most of us still expect hardware and sensors to be physical. What if we could push this boundary a bit more down? What if we fundamentally challenge the assumption that IoT hardware has to be physical?

Interesting opportunities comes out when the last element of IoT becomes virtualized. First of all, we have full stack IoT Solution on the cloud. There is absolutely no hardware dependency which is awesome as we are free to create, destroy and reprogram things easily. You could thousand of virtual devices for an hour, run your simulation and then destroy everything from a mouse click. It’s simple and elegant.

Secondly, by removing dependency upon hardware, we bring many developers and creators to the IoT ecosystem who could either not afford to purchase hardware or are not skilled enough to do it by themselves. Seeing running applications on virtual hardware acts as a great morale booster and removes psychological barrier to entry for many. The best way to explain IoT solutions in our opinion is to show how it works, and that’s exactly we could do with IoTify in less than 5 minutes. And once you get a running system and everything around it in your control, it’s much easier to start tinkering and applying new ideas to it.

Our Vision for IoTIFY

Our vision of IoTify is to become a single development platform of choice for developers, system integrators and IoT vendors. By engaging thousands of developers to our platform we want to create reusable and mature IoT components which could be simply plugged into a variety of IoT applications. We don’t want everyone to reinvent the wheel and learn by doing repeated mistakes. We want to build an ecosystem where developers, vendors and integrators help each other to build IoT system of systems which are more than the sum of its part.

Sounds exciting? We would love to read your thoughts.