The IoT opens up new revenue models and changes how businesses interact with customers. Due to our ever-changing technology environment, these new worthwhile solutions need to be built quickly and affordably with usability and scale in mind. Building out applications and the infrastructure required to accomplish this is doable in-house but requires significant investments from operations, IT, and engineering. There is a more efficient path.
An Application Enablement Platform (AEP) can help provide a clear vision to a successful IoT solution. There are certain components that every IoT solution needs: device management, visualizations, a rules engine, etc. Providing these crucial components is the main reason AEPs exist. Teams are adopting AEPs more and more to solve most of the foundational obstacles that are inherent when building a scalable IoT application.
AEPs aid the success of IoT by providing three main benefits. Teams can:
- Build applications more efficiently, in less time.
- Create solutions that securely scale to millions of devices.
- Leverage industry experts and crucial partnerships.
Time to Market
Building an IoT application is a massive investment with a ton of moving pieces. It requires teams with expertise in backgrounds such as software, hardware, infrastructure, and embedded systems. AEPs allow organizations to gain value from IoT investments faster because AEPs remove technology hurdles. IoT engineers and individuals with domain knowledge can solely focus on the problems that drive real customer value.
An AEP gives teams the ability to capitalize on no-code application development. At the click of a mouse, a solution can quickly and securely integrate with databases, call upon web services, or utilize third-party APIs.
Building a product on top of IoT technologies involves writing API services, implementing user authentication, creating user interfaces, and hosting all of the above somewhere – which is a huge undertaking. AEPs contain this functionality plus more, saving you from hosting your IoT infrastructure and gets you to an end-user application faster.
Scale and Security
The two most significant hurdles for an IoT platform is scale and security. It’s a staggering amount of effort to build an application and infrastructure to support the growth of millions of connected devices while making sure that security is a top priority. As mentioned before, AEPs help resolve all of the technical challenges, which include scale and security.
AEPs have created a platform that not only helps you quickly build and test new use cases and applications, but they can also grow and scale with you as your applications become successful. AEPs provides the APIs, software, and tools to get your organization to a successful proof of concept and feel confident that this is a solution you want to take to production.
While building out these solutions, an enterprise has to think about security, authentication, user roles, and providing users and key stakeholders with the access to only the data they should have access to. Using an AEP, businesses gain the ability to leverage industry best practices in scaling and securing and IoT applications by using an existing battle-tested toolset.
Best of all, using an AEP helps future-proof your applications. AEPs provide the tools to solve many different IoT problems. With its adoption, the platform that enables you to monitor your industrial machines could also support your smart office initiatives. Enterprises can quickly adopt new use cases, or even switch verticals knowing that an AEP can help support this change in the future.
Leverage Experts and Partnerships
Enterprises are more successful when they leverage industry experts to solve problems. Exceptional AEPs have solution engineers and experts that work with customers to build out proof of concepts. These engineers have the hands-on experience going from a proof of concept to a functioning production application. The solution engineers are the experts with industry experience based on best practices and pitfalls. This knowledge is invaluable to your organization.
By using an AEP, organizations get to tap into experts that have built real-world IoT applications, which leads to a more reliable and faster solution. Expertise plus an AEP even further accelerates the time it would take for you to get a real application integrated into a product, saving costs for your organization.
Along with in-house expertise, AEPs have an ecosystem of technical, strategic, and solution partners to support and help along the way. AEPs develop partnerships to help you fill in the gaps of any solution.
Summary
Enterprises can feel more secure with established partner relationships, in-house experts, and production-ready technology. As a recap, here are the benefits:
- Build future-proof, scalable applications faster. IoT engineers can focus on the problems that drive real customer value using no-code application builders.
- Build with scale and security top of mind.
- AEPs are built by IoT experts to help you connect all the dots in the IoT.
The Losant Enterprise IoT Platform is an excellent example of an AEP. Losant is composed of many different components that serve as the building blocks of your IoT application. Since Losant is here to support you along your IoT journey, we have an in-house solutions team to provide you with expertise and assistance along the way.
By supplying you with all the necessary tools, Losant saves you from managing complex infrastructure and helps reduce the overall complexity of your applications.
The Losant Platform is an AEP that delivers on these promises. Schedule a demo today to learn more.