Insights success the 20 fastest growing iot companies march 2017

The way of business solutions www.insightssuccess.com MARCH 2017

THE

20 Fastest Growing

IoT Companies

Chalk Talk Net Neutrality: With a Hanging Sword on its Head Go Green How can IoT Decelerate the Climate Change?

Kris Nair

President & CEO

ASCENDUM SOLUTIONS: Innovation Beyond Limits

Innovative Wearables for Health Benets Patrick Bertagna GTX Corp

The Most Cost Effective Way To Build An “IT” Brand Bob Gold Bob Gold & Associates

Editorial

T

he Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fastest growing technologies. Connecting all the devices and giving them the ability to store data, think, and act accordingly is definitely going to change the world. But, to give the machines this ability, all other technologies like cloud, big data, artificial intelligence, and their security have to be concatenated together.

This is the reason why IoT industry has set the record for the most mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in an industry. According to a report, in the year 2015 about $90 billion worth mergers and acquisitions were confessed by the IoT Market, which was more than the addition of the previous four years. Furthermore, the first three quarters of 2016 affirmed more than $100 billion worth M&A. According to the predictions, these numbers are further going to increase in the current year.

An Era of the Connected Devices

With the ability to preciously connect the devices, the market reports suggest the number of connected things to transcend the number of the connected cell phones, in the near future. The factors leading to the growth of IoT market are at the peak and are going to grow even faster in the coming years, suggests various trusted reports; some of which are inscribed below.

McKinsey, the biggest strategy consulting firm in the world, has estimated that the total IoT market size in 2015 was about $900M, and will grow to $3.7 billion by 2020 attaining a CAGR of 32.6%.

Bain, the third biggest strategy consulting firm, has predicted that by the year 2020, annual revenues could exceed $470 billion for the IoT vendors selling the hardware, software, and comprehensive solutions. Another research report from General Electric predicts that investment in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to cross $60 trillion during the next 15 years. Also, IHS forecasts, the IoT market will grow from an installed base of 15.4 billion devices in 2015 to 30.7 billion devices in 2020 and 75.4 billion in 2025.

With all these growing mergers and acquisitions, annual revenues, and connected devices, the IoT vendors all over the world are looking forward to become a part of the new connected world; and innovating their solutions and services as this is the beginning of the IoT’s era.

Vikram Suryawanshi

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Ariana Lawrence Managing Editor Vikram Suryawanshi Co-Editors David Smith Archana Ghule Masuk Siddik Stephanie Andrews Pankaj Shrotre Ujal Nair Sagar Bhattacharjee Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Alex Noel Picture Editor Harmeet Art Editor Vijaykumar Business Development Manager Mike Thomas Nick Adams Marketing Manager Chris Business Development Executive David, Peter, John, Brian Research Analyst Jennifer Circulation Manager Robert Database Management Steve Technology Consultant Vishal More sales@insightssuccess.com

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Content Page Cover Story

10

Ascendum Solutions: Innovation Beyond Limits

Kris Nair

President & CEO

Chalk Talk

28

20

Net Neutrality: With a Hanging Sword on its Head

CXO Standpoint

42

THE MOST COST EFFECTIVE WAY TO BUILD AN “IT” BRAND

36

Innovative Wearables for Health Benefits

Go Green How can IoT Decelerate the Climate Change?

26

Gaonic: Bringing Wisdom to the Internet of Things

30

22

24

Homerider Systems: Rendering IoT Solutions by Embedding the Need with Technology

Bob Gold & Associates: Building and Burnishing Brands from IoT to IT and Back

CENTRI Technology: Securing the Present and Future of IoT

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Icon Labs: Building the Internet of Secure Things

Aria Systems: Powerful Notion of Cloud Billing

JT: Joining Devices Together

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RtTech Software: A Leading Industrial Apps Provider

Kontakt.io: Building Beacon-Enabled Solutions

Tellient: Providing Analytics for Things

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46

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agrilution: Providing a Smart Garden for your own Home

Samsara: Internet Connected Sensors

Veniam:

Moving Massive Data between Vehicles and the Cloud

The

20 Fastest

IoT

Growing Companies

IoT as a Modus Operandi

T

oday, the whole world is a influenced by Internet of Things (IoT). Every sector of the market is leveraging the potential of IoT to foster their respective domain. Many people still define IoT as a technology. For sure this is a very underemphasized definition for IoT, as IoT is a convergence of several technologies like Big data, Cloud, and Artificial Intelligence. Hence, IoT is the way machines are going to work and not a technology.

Like a revolution, phenomenon of IoT is changing the way everything work. To drive this change every company is taking steps towards connected world. In this project of “The 20 Fastest Growing IoT Companies,” we have listed companies from different industries, which are upgrading their respective spheres with the power of IoT. Among thousands of IoT enablers, we have chosen these companies based on their innovative approach, ambitious vision, market presence, and their customer’s fulfillment.

We have selected Ascendum Solutions, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, as the cover of this issue, based on its contribution to major industries like Tech, Retail, Healthcare, and Finance.

Ascendum is a global information technology (IT) solutions company that delivers “Technology Inspired Solutions to Business Driven Challenges”. Ascendum works with SMBs and enterprise level organizations, including many Fortune 1000 companies, to help them solve their business challenges. Ascendum’s approach is built on the success of using the right combination of Strategy, People, Processes, Technology, and Infrastructure for each client situation in order to meet the specific business needs/challenges of each client and deliver exceptional results.

Along with the listing of the fastest growing IoT companies, we have included articles which will provide insights into the different strands of IoT. Also, we have incorporated the leader’s thoughts on the IoT's current market, and its future scope.

With the contribution of these companies to the industry, IoT as a Modus Operandi is quickly transforming from a phenomenon to substantiality.

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COVER

Ascendum Solutions:

INNOVATION

STORY

B E Y O N D

LIMITS I

nternet-of-Things (IoT) is expected to transform every industry by enabling seamless and uninterrupted machine-to-machine communication. The unprecedented growth of connected devices provides an untapped opportunity for service providers to develop new business models, revenue streams and an enhanced customer experience.

Today, enterprises driving digital transformation strategies take an in-depth view of adapting to emerging and ubiquitous trends such as AI, wearables, and smart connected devices powered by the IoT, while aiming to deliver innovative services. For end users, IoT provides an ambitious and unrestrained platform that maximizes productivity, insights, and quality of life. The opportunity to deliver value to end users by leveraging IoT is real, and service providers are crafting solutions to improve decision making and transform existing customer engagement models. However, as end users become cautious of protecting data emanating from devices, service providers are treading carefully and are beginning to get a sense of the challenges ahead.

Furthermore, regulators are faced with a new set of realities concerning data security and compliance policies with the emergence of IoT-driven UAVs, autonomous vehicles and AI. Implementing laws is time-consuming and that is why service providers take on the added responsibility to reduce potential risks, address media and consumer concerns, and enhance security.

Kris Nair

President & Chief Executive Officer

Ascendum Solutions makes IoT vision a reality and collaborates with customers at different stages to rapidly develop new IoT applications and services.

Moving Beyond the Idea: Early Success Since 2014, Ascendum Solutions has developed IoT applications to connect things, collect data and derive insights that allowed their clients to create personalized offers and services, innovative business models and processes and bigger business opportunities. Emphasizing on the value of IoT, Kris Nair, CEO, said “Our clients wanted to leverage IoT to develop applications and services that created new value streams for end users and helped respond to user needs in real-time. Secure and seamless platforms based on Ascendum’s solution integration capabilities allowed enterprises to quickly capture more data about processes and products and improve market agility.”

Ascendum’s earliest IoT innovation was to include digital capabilities in traditional “dumb” vending machines and transforming them into “Smart” ones. Adequate user customization, smart payments, and constant monitoring of inventory and consumption patterns allowed them to deliver a network of connected devices. This enabled their clients to access information generated by these vending machines, remotely and in real-time, and ultimately generate profitable revenues. This solution continues to add tremendous value to their partners by identifying deployments, conducting test marketing, and tracking trends/consumption preferences to adjust selections accordingly. Brands get the opportunity to interact with real-time dashboards and visualization tools to retrieve timely sales and maintenance information across deployed machines and deep-dive into individual point-of-sale (POS).

Ascendum’s next big IoT innovation was around deploying and enforcing Smart Parking Solutions for an entire city administration. In partnership with a high-growth, start-up, they created an IoT platform and rolled out a successful pilot in one of most traffic-congested cities in North America. This solution also scaled to empower cities ondemand to manage parking assets and provide a hassle-free parking experience for drivers, merchants and solution

providers. Describing their technology breakthroughs, Uday Kumar, Vice President of Sales, said “The use of low-cost sensors and real-time data analytics allowed users to monitor available and unavailable parking spots in airports, universities, shopping centers, city garages and even on-street parking. While parking guidance to drivers was offered through a mobile app, a real-time embeddable map displayed parking availability to businesses for a specific location or facility.” Ascendum’s web-based analytics platform helped the city administration in policy planning by enforcing/addressing parking violations and historical parking occupancy reports. This solution continues to provide automated parking support to cities, drivers and businesses with improved real-time insights and enforcement tools, integrated payments, POS support and new revenue streams for various stakeholders.

Their next big innovation focused on the retail industry, which remains the most disrupted sector by IoT applications. In 2014, their partner wanted to harness the power of IoT’s uninterrupted data to boost its bottom line. It aimed to create smarter supply chains and tailored marketing programs that catered to specific consumer needs and preferences. Ascendum made this vision a reality. Their group of IoT applications allowed retailers to offer personalized customer experiences, receive data-driven insights, and leverage a connected, unified retail experience.

Speaking about Ascendum’s out-of-the-box innovation, Kris said, “With a view to demonstrate the capabilities of its IoT innovations, we transformed a shopping mall to make hyperlocal content accessible to shoppers with beacondriven technology. We converted store surfaces/display devices to offer innovative, immersive retail experience by displaying personalized offers/merchandizing concepts.”

Today, these retail IoT solutions have been extended to better manage coupons, deals and loyalty programs, facilitate real-time alerts, offer support to just-in-time deliveries/kerb-side pickups and enhance customer satisfaction.

Leveraging IoT to Simplify

Business Processes

Over the years, Ascendum’s IoT applications have helped enterprises get an in-depth view of the business. By being able to track the supply chain end-to-end, their clients have reduced the costs of doing business in multiple locations.

Furthermore, their solutions allow partners to access information from autonomous endpoints, which enables them to make on-the-fly decisions on pricing, logistics, sales, and support deployment.

While Ascendum’s innovation labs continuously research and identify solutions for various verticals, (healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and education), they have recently focused their efforts on ensuring that clients avoid repetitive mistakes that are extremely disruptive in nature.

Often times, their partners develop a feature or functionality that is difficult to monetize or they thoroughly underestimate their customer’s security and privacy concerns. On the other hand, some partners overestimate their in-house team’s capabilities and infrastructure.

Reiterating their unique approach Joe Dooley, Vice President - Business Development, said “We have worked with organizations that either take an ‘IoT changes everything’ approach, or force existing technology

infrastructure to work with connected devices. However it’s important to realize that the IoT ecosystem continues to be immature and unpredictable.” And that is why, Ascendum supports and helps clients: 1.

2.

Address security and privacy issues: Organizations are concerned about protecting data emanating from devices and are beginning to understand the challenges.

Process data at the local/cloud/data center-level: Enterprises are still unsure of where to store and process data generated by devices. While some organizations want to process the data locally, others prefer to store and analyze data in a private/hybrid cloud, or move it within their data center. This uncertainty regarding data retrieval and storage in the current infrastructure leads to questions regarding Big Data.

With an aim to provide a competitive edge, foster innovation and capitalize on opportunities arising from IoT, Ascendum helps partners deliver connectivity, security, and an optimal customer experience.

Future

Forward

Ascendum is currently introducing IoT solutions for the manufacturing and retail sector. Their solutions connect IoT hardware with embedded software, and use a product cloud to manage and process data while integrating with security tools and business systems. This futuristic solution connects the dots between various business units and activities in an organization, works across silos of data, and creates realtime dashboards to drive competitive edge. Additionally, their integrated solutions allow factories to unlock operational efficiencies and optimize production lines, and ultimately deliver a seamless connected experience.

What’s more, Ascendum’s IoT solutions further enhance their client’s ability to offer digital transformation services in a seamless and consistent manner.

Talking about the future of IoT and their role in delivering it to the world, Kris says, “The IoT sector is poised for autonomy and we look forward to an immediate future where smart, connected devices assume and assert autonomy in product operations, self-coordinate with other devices, and self-diagnose to enable continuous product enhancement and services.”

About Ascendum Solutions Ascendum Solutions provides innovative technology solutions, services, and staff augmentation support to clients by leveraging industry expertise, global scale and technology excellence.

Ascendum’s success is based on its business and technology expertise, strategic partnerships, and deep industry experience, which allow companies to innovate and succeed in any industry. Its global delivery capabilities are driven by state-of-the-art delivery centers across the world and supported by modernized business processes.

Headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, Ascendum has sales and support offices in Hamilton & Blue Ash, OH and New York, NY with offshore delivery centers located in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, India. Ascendum is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vora Ventures Group, a Cincinnati-based private equity group that specializes in building innovative IT companies worldwide.

Ascendum has advanced technology and industry expertise to get clients’ ideas to market faster with product engineering services. We provide a wide range of business solutions covering Software Development, Software Maintenance and Software Re-engineering/Migration Services.

Their end-to-end product engineering services include, but are not limited to: Software Development (Desktop/Web/Mobile) Business/Web Apps & SaaS, UI/UX Design, Agile/Waterfall Methodology, Requirement Analysis, Solution Design & Architecture, Cloud & Virtualization, Independent Testing & Test Automation, Devops & Automation, and Sustenance Engineering, Continous Delivery & Application Support.

Business Solutions On-Demand In addition to Product Engineering Services, Ascendum provides the following Business Solutions.

SaaS Product Initiatives: They follow a Software-as-aService (SaaS) approach to developing client-centric products, right from micro-services, to role-based web applications and mobile end-points.

Intelligent Software Products: The team develops customized software to help enterprises overcome operational and tactical issues and accelerate business growth.

Unique Value Proposition to minimize risk, optimize processes, and accelerate scale.

Product Incubation Centers: Based on a build-operatetransfer model, they offer dedicated infrastructure (nearshore & offshore) and technical expertise while catering to product development needs – from conceptualization to execution.

Rapid Prototyping & Innovation Labs: Their rapid development provides clients with a small and lean prototype and continuously aligns with business requirements to kick start new strategic initiatives.

www.ascendum.com

Innovation: Based on an innovation-first principle, they leverage their IP portfolio and existing partner ecosystem to achieve faster time-to-market and cost reduction; Process Excellence – Their Best Practices approach ensures implementation of proven methodologies at all times Expertise – Their skilled resources, expertise and experience develop next-generation, future-ready solutions.

®

The

20 Fastest

IoT

Growing Companies

Company Name

Management

Brief

Agrilution agrilution.com

Maximilian Loessl CEO

Agrilution is a young, innovative Vertical Farming Technology startup based in Munich - Germany, which is dedicating its passion to solving one of our most pressing global challenges: providing sustainable and healthy food to the world.

Aria Systems ariasystems.com

Brendan O’Brien Co- Founder & CIO

Aria replaces billing systems that can’t meet the demands of global businesses that need to leverage recurring revenue models, increase customer satisfaction and accelerate revenue growth.

Aricent aricent.com

Frank Kern CEO

Aricent is a global design and engineering company innovating for the digital era. They help the world’s leading companies solve their most important business and technology innovation challenges - from Customer to Chip.

Ascendum ascendum.com

Kris Nair President & CEO

Ascendum Solutions provides innovative technology solutions, services and staff augmentation support to clients by leveraging industry expertise, global scale and technology excellence.

Bob Gold & Associates bobgoldpr.com

Bob Gold Founder & CEO

Bob Gold & Associates builds and burnishes brands, specializing in hi-tech, consumer electronics and media companies.

CENTRI Technology centritechnology .com

Vaughan Emery Founder, CEO & President

CENTRI provides advanced security for the Internet of Things.

Their technology helps organizations secure what matters most in IoT - their data.

Covisint covisint.com

Sam Inman III CEO

Covisint is the leading Cloud Platform for building Identity and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and enables the identification, authorization and connection of complex networks of people, processes, systems and things.

Gaonic gaonic.com

Rami Refaeli Co-Founder & CEO

Gaonic is a cloud-hosted SaaS AI platform that enables manufacturers to better manage operations and maximize savings through the use of analytics, machine learning, and application.

Homerider Systems homeridersystems .com

Xavier Mathieu General Manager

Homerider Systems, the European leader in providing smart water solutions and manufacturing, developing & deploying connected sensors.

Icon Labs iconlabs.com

Alan Grau President & Co-Founder

Icon Labs provides unique and specialized security software for IoT devices and embedded systems

The

20 Fastest

IoT

Growing Companies

Company Name

Management

Brief

JT Global jtglobal.com/ wholesale

Paul Bullock Head of IoT

JT Global is a full-service global consumer and business enterprise provider.

Kontakt.io kontakt.io

Szymon Niemczura Co-founder & CEO

Kontakt.io provides beacon solution providers, mobile agencies as well as software houses with beacon hardware & software to help them build the beacon-enabled apps.

Phoenix Energy Tech phoenixet.com

Lisa Varga Chief Executive Officer & Founder

RtTech Software rttechsoftware.com

Keith Flynn President & Founder

RtTech Software is a leading Industrial Apps provider, helping global clients in the manufacturing, mining, and power generation industries increase productivity and decrease energy consumption through operational intelligence.

Samsara samsara.com

Sanjit Biswas Founder & CEO

Samsara builds sensor systems that combine wireless sensors with remote networking and cloud-based analytics - all in an easy-to-use, software-centric solution.

Tellient tellient.com

Tristan Barnum Founder

Tellient put the technology in connected devices that makes them smarter for the consumers that use them and the companies that make them because even without a “smart” operating system.

Theatro theatro.com

Chris Todd President & CEO

Theatro is a Dallas-based technology startup pioneering the market’s first voice-controlled enterprise wearable for brick and mortar retail, hospitality, and manufacturing.

ThroughTek throughtek.com

Patrick Kuo President

ThroughTek Co., Ltd. is a leading IoT (Internet of Things) total solution provider for cloud connection platform. It has been applying its leading P2P connection technology to support streamlined enterprise entry into the IoT and M2M markets, transforming to an IoT solution provider in 2012.

TrackR thetrackr.com

Chris Herbert CEO & Co-Founder

TrackR’s app, cloud databases and small Bluetooth devices have helped millions of people locate their misplaced items.

TrackR has shipped over 4.5 million devices and is sold in over 4,000 stores worldwide.

Veniam veniam.com

João Barros Founder & CEO

Veniam offers robust and cost-effective ways of providing invehicle internet access and seamless connectivity to cars or fleet.

Phoenix Energy Technologies helps retailers, universities, grocery stores and theaters accomplish these goals by providing best-in-class software that monitors and controls their energy usage with minimal additional hardware.

MAXIMILIAN LOESSL Co-founder

agrilution: Providing a Smart Garden for your own Home

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hat if you could harvest what you eat at your home? With IoT, the imaginations get transformed into reality. You get numerous on the house benefits by harvesting in your kitchen such as fresh greens, free from pesticides and consequently healthy and nutritious food. There is no need to rely on the climate’s temperature as this technology offers plug and grow feature. Also, it is possible to monitor and control with ideal plant growing recipe, which you preset using your connected mobile device including automatic watering and ideal light. It reduces food waste and works in the way you want. This innovative technology is what you always wanted as a part of your home appliances. agrilution is a company that offers the plantCube, a complete vertical farming

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ecosystem consisting of a smart plug‘n’play home-growing appliance and consumables (pads with seeds), as well as a smartphone app that eliminates the need for a green thumb.

Thereby agrilution enables consumers to grow the healthiest, freshest, and taste intensive greens in their own homes.

Origination of agrilution Maximilian Loessl, Co-founder of agrilution is a 28-year old entrepreneur and highly sought-after speaker on the potential of Vertical Farming to improve our malfunctioning global food system.

About 5 years ago, while travelling through New Zealand, Maximilian first came across the topic of Vertical Farming, through a book called “The Vertical Farm” written by Dr. Dickson

Despommier of Columbia University in New York City. He got amused by the concept of Vertical Farming, because it combined local food production with technology.

Maximilian has always been interested in the Global Grand Challenges and in his personal opinion, solving the food challenge is the most important one.

Therefore, he reached out to the author and fortunately he immediately got reply. They both exchanged some Emails and Maximilian asked where in the world he could study something related to this technology. Dr. Dickson Despommier suggested HAS University in the Netherlands. So, Maximilian applied for that university, got in, and moved to the Netherlands.

During his studies Maximilian had a lot of free time as the town he lived

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The

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IoT

Growing Companies

‘‘

greens, in your own home, right before you eat them –

‘‘

With the agrilu on plantCube, you harvest your own re-defining the term from “farm to fork”

and studied in was rather small and tedious. He spent most of the time researching Vertical Farming on the internet and discussing about it with his professors and experts from around the world.

Maximilian always tried to think of ways of getting involved with Vertical Farming during his studies, as he didn’t have the patience to wait 4 years until graduation.

What bothered him most was that Vertical Farming had tremendous benefits for so many of the challenges traditional agriculture was facing, but no one really knew about it.

He then realized that he needed to show people that this technology was available and profitable today. He wanted to create awareness for Vertical Farming by democratizing the technology and making it available to the masses. That resulted in the idea of the plantCube and eventually the founding of agrilution in early 2013.

Targeted Customers The technology agrilution provides is beneficial for everyone. But, to accelerate the awareness through people, the team of agrilution is targeting foodies – people that value high quality food. They are targeting the people who are looking for transparency, people that already shop for organic produce, and love cool technological revolutions.

The range of people who have placed orders is quite wide from 25-65. And as the target customers differ from marketto-market, the team of agrilution needs to define their targeted audience frequently.

Hence, they provide full transparency to what people eat, what is in their food. Using the plantCube, people can get rid of pesticides. They get the freshest food, full with natural vitamin and mineral, no genetically modified organisms (gmo), beyond organic, taste intense, and unique varieties of plants they cannot find in supermarkets.

Future of Smart Home Sector To Max, the future of IoT means the “Internet of Everything.” Since, agrilution is focusing on the smart home sector, they are paying close attention to what is going on in the development of smart kitchen appliances.

Referring to the future of IoT and their contribution to it Maximilian asserts, “I think it will be possible that a sensor in your toilet tells you what nutrients your body needs and we will be able to grow plants based on your personal nutritional demand; in other words a highly bioavailable personal nutrition service. Additionally, you will be able to get recipe suggestions you can cook with the plants we grow!”

Speaking of the near future, the team of agrilution is launching their product ecosystem in Germany this year and are shipping to early adopters starting this month! A larger pre-order phase for the series product is targeted for after the summer. www.agrilution.com

The unique thing about their product offering is that people don’t need any experience with growing plants, no need for a green thumb because the plantCube sets the right climate, waters the plants, and provides the right light for plants to thrive!

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BRENDAN O’BRIEN Co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer

Aria Systems: Powerful Notion of Cloud Billing

I

oT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), micro-services and the internet. The convergence has helped tear down the siloed walls between Operational Technologies (OT) and Information Technologies (IT), allowing unstructured machine-generated data to be analyzed for insights that will drive improvements.

Aria Systems provides the only cloudbased platform that is both robust and scalable enough to help enterprises seize new market opportunities and meet customer demands by rapidly deploying monetization models and quickly delivering new plans and packages. Aria is purpose-built to deliver unlimited monetization opportunities, maximize returns from every customer event (or “revenue moment”) including billing, provisioning, and servicing of products, and increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Geared up to be a unique service provider

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In founding Aria, Brendan O’Brien and Edward Sullivan set out to find better ways for online companies to bill for their products and services. The idea for the company and technology was spawned from their frustration of integrating antiquated billing systems that were not agile enough to effectively manage usage or subscription-based services.

The rush to recurring billing was growing far beyond their telecommunications vantage point to every corner of the economy: media, software, consumer goods and services. Enter the expanded capabilities of next-generation Cloud technologies, providing an opportunity for a more affordable, agile and powerful billing system. From there, the founders invented cloud-based billing and Aria Systems was born.

Today, Aria provides the most comprehensive, flexible, and efficient cloud-based billing and monetization platform available on the market.

Practicalities, As A Platform Aria Systems’ cloud-based billing and monetization platform is the analysts’

consensus choice and is top ranked by leading research firms. The company’s software complements legacy billing systems that can’t meet the needs of businesses who need to modernize to leverage recurring revenue models that increase customer satisfaction and retention, accelerate growth, and grow competitive advantage. Global enterprises like Adobe, Philips, and Pitney Bowes depend on Aria to bring the widest variety of product offerings to market in the quickest time possible.

With Aria they maximize customer value and grow recurring revenue through subscription and usage-based offerings. Aria helps businesses succeed by enabling: Unlimited Monetization Models: Aria enables companies to quickly configure the widest variety of monetization models, changing the operations dynamic so billing operations help drive the growth of a business, versus impede it.

Orchestration of Revenue Moments: Aria lets organizations manage and automate responses from revenue moments ranging from the initial

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Maximizing Customer Life me Value, Fueling Growth

transaction to the final invoice. For instance, customers can self-select to purchase additional products and services, making the most from each contact.

Innovation at Business Speed: With Aria, the line of business can bypass IT and quickly configure changes to pricing, packaging and even product offerings without timeconsuming coding.

Mastermind Behind the Ideology Brendan O’Brien is Chief Innovation Officer and Cofounder at Aria Systems. He introduced the world to cloud billing, and innovated database-driven, enterprise-grade web applications before the concept of “cloud” was on the horizon. O’Brien is the industry’s foremost thinker on recurring revenue: enabling new business models, improving business processes, providing multi-dimensional customer choice, and ultimately increasing revenue. The product architecture he designed for Aria was the culmination of that experience; it’s an infinitely flexible and scalable cloud-based billing and monetization solution that can be adapted to any industry or vertical. Aria’s recognized leadership confirms Brendan’s original vision.

Working with the Parameters Aria’s customers are enterprise level corporations from a wide range of industries, countries and implementations.

Aria Systems is unique in its capabilities. With its configurable product catalog clients can bring products to market in weeks, not months. With a flexible account hierarchy end customers’ billing can be infinitely customized without adding headcount or resources. Its enterprise grade architecture is robust and scalable to work in enterprise environments, in any currency, language, time zone or taxing body.

Key Benefits Speed: With Aria’s platform, companies can roll out new products and services an order of magnitude faster, completing months-long processes in matter of few days.

Customer Lifetime Value: Aria’s capabilities, which provide a single record of truth for complete 360 degree view of customer account information, help to meet exacting customer needs, create initial sales, and upsell and cross-sell opportunities at every customer touchpoint.

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20 Fastest

Enterprise grade: Aria is purpose-built for enterprise implementations that demand the highest possible levels of reliability, security, and scalability. Among the first to gain EU-US Privacy Shield compliance, Aria also has HIPAA, PCI DSS, and TRUSTe certifications.

Vision Procured Through Experience In order to fully cash in on the Internet of Things, companies need the agility to experiment with innovative monetization models that might not even exist today. Yet, legacy back-end billing systems aren’t prepared to manage the new IoT pricing schemes associated with increasingly popular pay-per-use models. Aria enables companies to quickly price, package and bundle digital offerings with the ability to then test and iterate based on customer preferences.

Biggest Challenges to IoT Solution Providers Agility: Existing payment systems, frequently designed many years ago with a traditional two-year product development cycle in mind, will need to be updated or replaced or they will bottleneck organizations implementing IoT plans.

Connectivity: IoT providers will need to learn to share.

Even automakers, who traditionally do not collaborate, but are seeing their industry transformed by IoT and related autonomous car technology, have recognized this.

Security: IoT security today has been described by Internet security experts like Bruce Schneier as a “market failure”, meaning that there is little to no incentive for manufacturers, who want the lowest costs, to build security into devices.

Future Proofing In June, the report of IoT in the EU will be released.

Recently, a new position, vice president of professional services and customer success was filled by a seasoned enterprise transformation expert, Arun Thakur. In his new role, Thakur will lead the global team to accelerate the success of Aria’s clients. www.ariasystems.com

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Go Green

IoT

How can Decelerate the

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he relation between technology and the environment of our planet is very old. The time has come to turn everything in the surrounding ecofriendly. IoT (Internet of Things) products can be tailored to combat with the climate change and its consequences.

Whether it is a disaster like ood or an issue like deforestation, this technology is capable to protect us and our environment in several ways. Have you ever wondered how technology could save our natural resources? Yes, IoT has the potential to resolve such problems as it involves animals and plants in our connected world.

IoT business owners are getting encouragement from the governments and corporates to build smart and intelligent

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devices that help us Go Green. In order to keep our environment safe, the IoT makers must come up with the good ideas that satisfy the current demands of the ecosystem. Innovative products would be incorporated for domestic as well as industrial use.

Energy Saving IoT products are aimed to save energy using automated systems. For instance, smart lighting can sense sunlight and is able to maintain constant lighting level. The smart home appliances implement energy management. Smart buildings use solar energy and other renewable energy sources to minimize environmental impact. | March 2017

Go Green

Animal Tracking With IoT, it is becoming easier to track rare species. Animal tracking helps scientists and conservationists to know their location and their tendency towards migration. The microsensors paired with IoT enable multiple devices to connect together for the purpose to collect, transmit, and store data.

According to a study, there is a need to implant a billion trees a year to recover, which can only be possible if an automated system is used. IoT and drones are assembled and deployed to perform this task efficiently. It reduces manpower requirements and cost and uses agriculture techniques for planting and maintenance.

Waste Management When the IoT technology was introduced, it was predicted that it would increase e-waste. But this problem was mere a part of the solution. IoT provides a great way to manage waste and recycle. The sensors installed in chips would be able to notify consumers when it is ready to repair or recycle. They also inform the users which component can be reused so that they do not go trash early. For the management of other wastage, IoT products can be designed to automate disposal system timely.

Animal tracking is also important to maintain the way our ecosystem works.

Reduce Pollution It is very interesting to see how IoT fight with the pollution.

The real-time data is used for forecasting pollution parameters and measuring the elements of air and water quality. The technology focuses on keeping pollution to a minimum. Air pollution can be detected and evaluated across all the industries to ensure that they stick to the air quality policies.

Water Management IoT devices can transform the way we manage the most precious resource-water. With the advanced water sensors, these products make decisions and produce data analytics about the amount of water we use. It allows us to save money and to minimize water usage for its conservation.

Smart Farming Smart farming is shaping the future of agriculture, which impacts on the environment positively. These small devices automate the process of farming using harvesting and irrigation. The technology can be used to choose fertilizers in accordance with the conditions of the soil. Drones can play the crucial role in monitoring the whole cultivation.

Natural Disaster Detection Notably, natural disaster is a dreadful outcome of climate change. IoT products can be used to detect natural disaster at the early stage and to minimize the damages. Earthquake and flood sensors send out the signals to the cloud-based servers connected with the internet. In the case of detection, residents of that area get warning signals. Internet of underwater things is used for monitoring activities of oceans and rivers.

There are hundreds of ideas to think upon and hundreds of solutions to work on. For example, traffic control reduces carbon production by saving gasoline and food security assists in balancing the ecosystem. Undoubtedly, climate change is the biggest challenge of our time and it is our concern to give healthier environment to the next generation. Other technologies such as artificial intelligence can be associated with the IoT to get better insights and success in combatting with this problem.

The connectivity among things (instead of devices only) can make our everyday life more sustainable. But, the efforts made till yet to decelerate climate change are insufficient. The future demands a planet where all the living things get safety against it. There is no exaggeration in saying that IoT enabled systems can make climate change turn back. IoT products make us more organized, more sustaining, safer, and greener.

Prevent Deforestation Deforestation is one of the major causes of climate change.

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BOB GOLD Founder & CEO

Bob Gold & Associates:

Building and Burnishing Brands from IoT to IT and Back

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uick: What’s the difference between a squirrel and a rat?

Answer: PR

That’s a simple fast way to consider how public relations and good storytelling makes a brand.

Whether it’s a missed media opportunity, a client miscommunication, an office drama, or the reaction to an Alt News piece, bad things happen in business all the time.

And as a rule, poor stories and storytelling was the likely culprit. To build the right story that is authentic to the brand requires good strategies. A strategy is the same for all organizations from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

Bob Gold & Associates, an independent PR and marketing agency, provides its clients with strategies that resonate and engage, propelling their business forward with an immediate and positive impact on the bottom line.

This core messaging becomes a foundation upon which to elevate its CEO, define the organization and

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provide comforting shade within the industries it serves. The company leverages numerous disciplines including public relations, social media, content marketing, advertising, special events, and new business development to help clients reach their target audience and thrive.

In today’s world, it appears the priority is all about the speed of innovation and how we move content safely, effectively, efficiently and securely.

But if no one knows about your solution, how will they purchase and use it? And where on earth are folks getting their information? As we all know, there has been an explosion in digital media, bloggers, social media platforms, in addition to traditional media outlets. Someone has to track all these changes professionally and understand the dynamics in building a brand.

The Particulars of Bob Gold & Associates Founded in 1997, Bob Gold & Associates (BG&A) is an independent Southern California-based public

relations agency, with offices in New York and an established international network of high tech PR agencies around the world. The company delivers meaningful connections for its clients through integrated communications programs.

The company’s core specialty is in the entertainment technologies content production, distribution and monetization - from content creation to the technologies that connect consumers with brands. The company is internationally recognized for its unique expertise in the telecommunications, broadcast, distribution, programming, sports, production workflow, IT, security, and digital content sectors.

The company co-founded the Whiteoaks International Network, comprised of 17 PR agencies in 37 countries across four continents, providing a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation, and technical excellence. Bob Gold & Associates has the experience, track record, contacts, and personalized attention to ensure | March 2017

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We are regarded as industry leaders in digital strategy and solu ons, focused solely on delivering great user experiences

the client’s organization receives the best communications counsel and tactical execution possible.

About the CEO Bob Gold is the Founder and CEO of Bob Gold & Associates. During his more than 30 years in public relations and marketing, Gold has helped launch a dozen companies, re-branded many others, and created successful campaigns for numerous startups and Fortune 500 companies. He has also helped to raise millions of dollars for charities, taught hundreds of students, and helped to create further strategic business plans for numerous businesses.

Gold holds a Master’s degree in Communications Management from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, where he also sits on the Alumni Board of Directors.

Telecommunications Bob Gold & Associates provides services to various industries such as telecommunication, broadcast, distribution, programming, sports, production workflow, IT, security, and digital content sectors. The company tackles these industries from every angle. Clients include Amazon Studios, Cisco, Ooyala, Penthera, and the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA). Other clients are Hitachi, Hitron, placemedia, Universal Electronics, Viamedia, and Zone TV. With a team of top-caliber professionals, the company is dedicated to furthering the clients’ brand and communicating their unique benefits and value. They are skilled at reputation management. Since the company’s inception in 1997, the company has consistently delivered powerful results through strategies that reflect unparalleled connections and industry insights. Bob Gold & Associates has expanded its reach globally. As companies increasingly require global communications programs, it now delivers a cohesive international campaign with one single US-based leadership and account management contact.

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breadth of contacts in the industries it serves. They also strive to provide the highly personalized approach of the company’s team. For example, the team listens to the clients and summarizes their communications objectives and value propositions to tell the strongest story possible across all the appropriate mediums.

Challenges for IoT Companies Bob Gold & Associates outlines some challenges that IoT solution provider companies face: Ÿ

Adoption and ROI: The companies need to work together for speedier adoption of connected cars, homes, and businesses.

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5G: As 5G promises to be the ultimate platform for IoT applications and deployments, the companies need to create the roadmaps and timelines.

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Data Overload: In order to manage smart homes, connected cars, and IoT service businesses, the companies must define the role of mobile networks in managing all the data seamlessly.

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Technology Innovation: The companies need to overcome technological hurdles to deliver new IoT experiences to customers.

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Security Everywhere: IoT security remains one of the biggest question marks for businesses and consumers.

Future of IoT Sector IoT is an inevitable and unstoppable wave that inserts itself into every imaginable and unimaginable function in business, facilities, municipalities, and our personal lives.

The most important job is to continue to communicate each company value and innovation to further drive growth and standardization across the industry and all geographies.

Bob Gold says his company expects even more engagement with IoT focused companies in the near future. www.bobgoldpr.com

While doing business with Bob Gold & Associates, the clients get many benefits. “Our publicity and PR campaigns result in real business sales – most recently our efforts for one of our clients resulted in Comcast calling them to launch their service,” Gold said.

Bob Gold & Associates remains at the pinnacle in the industry because of its strategic counsel, creativity, and March 2017 |

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VAUGHAN EMERY Founder CEO & President

CENTRI Technology: Securing the Present and Future of IoT

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oT solution providers are all very much in the wild west era of IoT development. While industry standards are still evolving, solution providers must ensure compatibility with numerous hardware platforms and Cloud providers. As devices become smaller the available footprint for solutions can become constrained. IoT solution providers need flexible and scalable solutions that can easily fit with new advancements in both hardware and software for IoT. CENTRI Technology is a company which is coping up with these changing needs of IoT, as an IoT solution provider.

CENTRI provides advanced security for the Internet of Things. Their technology helps organizations secure

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what matters most – their data – by seamlessly integrating into existing applications and services in the cloud, data centers, connected devices, and products. CENTRI eliminates the risk of data exfiltration and loss of equipment command by establishing trusted devices and advanced encryption technology while retaining complete visibility to their client’s data. Thus, IoT developers and innovators rely on CENTRI to protect the full lifecycle of their data – in transit, at rest, and on the endpoint.

Providing Ideal Security Platform With the vision to become the most trusted provider of IoT security solutions by empowering developers to implement solution into their own IoT products and services, CENTRI

provides, CENTRI Internet of Things Advanced Security – IoTAS, which is a complete, standards-based software security platform enabling developers to easily implement device integrity, data encryption, and optimization into their products and services. IoTAS can be easily embedded on endpoints, applications, network servers and Cloud infrastructure to secure and optimize all data in motion and at rest.

Furthermore, IoTAS uses cache mapping technology and efficient algorithms, resulting in 20% less CPU utilization, less heat and less use of power with IoT devices.

Founder of CENTRI Vaughan Emery, Founder, CEO and President of CENTRI is passionate about helping the industry to meet the | March 2017

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We have designed our solu ons for IoT developers like you to simplify development efforts and speed me-to-market minus the pi alls of do-it-yourself tools

unique challenges of data security for the Internet of Things. He founded CENTRI in 2010 with a vision to deliver technology that helps to secure enterprise data and to improve network efficiencies. As a business leader, Mr. Emery is responsible for the company leadership and vision, strategic direction, planning, and execution.

Vaughan’s career spans more than 20 years in leadership roles of early stage companies. Throughout his career, Mr. Emery has developed key business relationships with enterprises, OEMs and technology partners within the US, Asia, and Europe.

Providing Security to a Wide Spectrum of Clientele CENTRI provides IoT security to developers of devices from organizations across a number of industries including automotive, contract manufacturers, healthcare, home automation, industrial, OEMs/ODMs, smart cities, transportation, and utilities. CENTRI’s unique approach is to empower IoT developers with the IoTAS platform they install themselves into their endpoints and the Cloud.

IoTAS is purpose-built for IoT security to provide a simpler, faster, and more complete solution than do-ityourself approaches or recycled enterprise solutions. IoTAS authenticates devices, protects the data in all states, simultaneously compresses the data and provides user management and analytics to all activities with a footprint as small as 50kB. Additionally, IoTAS boasts certificate-less technology to avoid issues with certificate exchanges and vault-less technology to remove the key vault management hassle and expense associated with a Hardware Security Module.

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allows IoT developers to focus on their area of expertise knowing no data down to the byte level is ever exposed, their devices are authenticated to mitigate spoofing, and they can maximize uptime of battery-powered devices as the solution uses less CPU for slower battery drain.

Future of IoT sector Mr. Emery knows that in the future, automation across industries with access to Big Data insights are two areas that IoT will help to propel in the coming years. As devices become smarter, they will allow broader automation of services in sectors like retail, transportation, utilities, home automation, and more. Big Data is another area where companies want access to smart insights to drive business decisions without having to compromise on user experience and security of the data. Fulfilling these demands, CENTRI IoTAS is a software-only security solution with the flexibility to fit small devices to large equipment used in automation. “Our ability to access Big Data while in a protected state is another area CENTRI can support,” says Mr. Emery.

Speaking of the near future, CENTRI will be announcing new customer adds for IoT security later this year along with several improvements in future releases of the IoTAS platform. “We hope to see you at one of the many IoT conferences, and trade shows where we discuss IoT security with passion!” added Vaughan. www.centritechnology.com

The Benefits Gained by the Clients Customers always choose the best available solution in the market, and they prefer CENTRI because IoTAS was specifically designed to solve the issues of securing IoT devices and data. Companies can install the solution on endpoints from small silicon to large-scale equipment and be up and running in hours or days versus months of costly internal development. Also, time to market is greatly shortened without compromising on protection. CENTRI

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RAMI REFAELI Co-founder & CEO

Gaonic: Bringing Wisdom to the Internet of Things

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he IoT is a new phenomenon that is taking the world by storm. Prompting new product innovations and igniting better revenue streams, it is connecting smart devices.

With cloud based technologies to connect various devices, Gaonic offers a flawless approach that provides smooth networking even from remote systems.

Gaonic is a cloud-hosted SaaS AI platform that enables manufacturers to better manage operations and maximize savings through the use of analytics, machine learning, and application.

Gaonic offers a set of cloud-based IoT building blocks that help to build datacentric solutions to improve their sensor efficiency while saving human and capital resources. As a result, their projects allow their customers to have

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an optimized management of sensor environment. Their mission is to empower their data centric IoT analytics collection platform that allows them to offer a cost effective solution for real-time cloud based solutions.

Leveraging various Technologies to Empower IoT Gaonic provides a full solution, all-inone system; thus no integration or code is necessary to capture and manage huge amounts of data from any physical object or existing IT systems.

They provide highly optimized and highly secured, real time cloud based solution. Gaonic’s platform lets the clients to integrate and aggregate data from any type of data source, irrespective of their type, data format, manufacturer, structure, or protocol.

Furthermore, their inbuilt analytics

engine is made for historical and real time, and basic and advanced data insights. They use simple APIs and open architecture for easily sharing information with other third party systems.

Their artificial intelligence (AI) technology teaches itself to adapt and improve when exposed to new timeseries data. This “machine learning” capability detects interrelationships within complex data sets, which enables the discovery of valuable but otherwise hidden insights. This allows new innovative IoT applications to be quickly customized and hit the market 20 times more quickly than other approaches with their rapid application customization environment.

Gaonic leverages big data and analytics to provide new insights and recommendations to enable better

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At Gaonic, we are passionate and want to see IoT become an open, easy,

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secured, and empowering system that is used throughout the world

decision-making and provide better operation. Furthermore, they enable Smart Enterprises and IoT vendors to easily visualize data and take action immediately on insights and recommendations and find new ways to conduct business and make informed decisions.

Serving in various Industries Customers of Gaonic come from corporations of all sizes, belonging to various industries. The phenomenon of IoT has engulfed the entire world, covering all walks of life.

Since it has started to become a way of life, there is no industry that is completely unaffected by its presence.

Moreover, Gaonic is used by manufacturing companies to make better, faster decisions about their manufacturing operations.

Gaonic’s IoT SaaS analytics solution provides companies with increased visibility and allows them to gain deeper insight into operations. Their analytics platform, built for discrete and process manufacturing, uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to help address critical challenges that pertain to quality assurance and productivity throughout the enterprise.

The platform using Gaonic’s analytics is capable of enhancing other things, including forecasting production, detecting failures in goods and minimizing damage, benchmarking, and golden batch analysis. Also, companies can leverage real-time and off-line data from the shop floor and tie it to the scheduling ERP system.

CEO’s view on IoT Technology and its Market Rami Refaeli is the Co-founder & CEO of Gaonic. Being in the technology industry, and serving the future of technology, he says that Gaonic is at the forefront of helping enterprises and IoT vendors implement new technologies that not only bring increased operational efficiency, but also recast their customers’ experiences, revolutionize business models, and enable companies to

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reimagine how their industries operate and transform into smart industries.

Rami further adds that IoT technologies have developed and evolved over the past decade in drastic ways.

Affordable sensors and fast connections have radically increased the amount and type of data available and altered the way companies collect and use it. Huge amounts of data are produced, but not used properly.

“More importantly, they have changed the way many conduct business. This technological shift is challenging some of the oldest industries which are still struggling to understand the implications of industrial IoT on their businesses and to explore new ways of thinking about their identities, and Gaonic is playing a central role in driving these transformations,” he concludes.

Future of IoT sector The field of IoT technologies has developed and evolved over the past decade in significant ways, but there is still a lot of confusion caused by a lack of best practices. Many companies tend to choose partial solutions and then find themselves facing compatibility problems. There are other companies that try to develop everything from scratch, but end up in projects that cost millions and take years to complete.

After working for over 20 years on various IoT platforms, it is clear to Gaonic now that IoT analytics solutions will change the way many conduct businesses.

Gaonic is at the forefront of driving the transformations that are helping more and more companies. “Our services are enabling Smart Enterprises and industrial IoT vendors to create better services and offer immediate response, leading to better operations and maximize saving,” asserts Rami. www.gaonic.com

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Chalk Talk

Net Neutra ity:

With a Hanging Sword on its Head he internet is a smaller imprint of the actual world. It carries all the information in the world and displays it in front of you, choosing of your like, with few fingers away. It is a door to everything that unlocks vast knowledge, entertainment, information and what not. Net neutrality stands on the principle that ISP would allow gateway to all subjects and web-applications irrespective of the source, instead of prioritizing or stopping certain items or websites. In simple terms, no internet traffic has importance over another, allowing consumers freely explore the internet. How cruel it sounds, but there is certainly a hanging sword at the head of net neutrality, meaning to say it is on the verge of losing the hard fought battle against “Big Money” that ISP’s are adding into.

In detailed version of it, Net neutrality is all about the quest for free access to the web services of the vast internet which is not limited by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) or authority on the substance, websites and the existing podium. Though, it serves as a huge drawback for the ISPs, making it a constantly targeted and bombarded concept. Rather than choosing sides or talking about the lost war, let's analyze the future without net neutrality and the advantages it brings that we will miss for sure.

Prioritizing the Internet and the Shut Doors While accessing websites, you might have noticed that some of the websites get loaded faster while others take some time, like the example of bit torrent. You will find more often than not bit torrent download of an open-source software is very slow. Thanks to your ISPs; they are often responsible for filtering your usage from their side in order to decrease the stack which is draining their bandwidth. One of the major reasons that this is happening, as it has been evident that bit-torrent is a very common protocol, which uses, as much as fifty percent of internet traffic alone.

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Ultimately, ISP’s in order to bring down their bandwidth cost and reduce traffic, they will trim down the internetspeed of these sites. Usually, Internet Service Providers implement the Quality of Service (QoS) in order to mark important packets high priority and leave their routers first.

They will differentiate the various types of packets, and analyze the packets to list down the significance of the given packet.

The Lost Profit Web users are permitted to link to whichever internet site or service of their choice. ISP’s should not have any sort of problem with the type of content that is rolling from the servers. That is the exact thing which defines internet as a truly global network. It also allows users to freely express themselves. Let’s take a look at some advantages that we will miss with the vanishing of net neutrality.

Limitless: Today internet is limitless, in a sense that the only restrictions come from whatever local government puts on. For example, there are no limitations or priorities over mailing, file transferring, real time messaging, Voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP), Video Conferencing, Podcasts, articles, Really Simple Syndication feeds and USENET etc.

No Throttling: In the recent times, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are not allowed to alter the download or upload transfer rates and monitor the particular websites.

Free of Censorship: Users are free to upload the content without any censorship or monitoring, the only factors which get affected is connection rates.

A Symbol of Free Market: Net Neutrality is all about a level playing ground for rival businesses; it offers the new entrants simpler ways to reach new potential customers. Net Neutrality is a symbol of a free market.

Capitalism: Net neutrality offers competitive market and delivers the chance to each business, from large business to new startups to take part in it.

not achieve the success upon which they have built on. For better future prospects, net neutrality is the key.

Beyond Net Neutrality Let’s hear another side of the story, there is an umber amount of situation in which we all should agree that ISPs or local government should be allowed to handle various kinds of traffic unevenly, while increasing some of the speeds and trimming down others. Consider a specific network connection that is mobbed, a very common situation, with mobile data and the network routing facilities of ISPs are connected with each other’s networks.

Let's list down some of the future scenarios we will have to face with net neutrality out of the picture.

Roadblock in the Development Cycle: Service companies are only resistant to the applications and equipment which can change a slower uploading rate to a faster rate. Most of these applications and equipment are introduced for theft purposes.

Monitoring an easy Access to Certain Materials: It can be said that the majority of people will oppose the loss of net neutrality, but even they will put their hand down while addressing some issues. One of the major objections of net neutrality is that easy access to some objectionable materials, hate sites, and high chances for kids to be exposed to the content that is granted for adults only.

Stopping Illegal use: Bandwidth which is available with a restrained commodity and guidelines will aid in limiting illegal use of this platform. With little prioritization or constraint is vital to back the best attention of buyers as a whole.

So all considered, we can safely say that with advantages net neutrality brings to the table, there is a little bit of scope where we can look beyond net neutrality and move on. Yet we hope it stays, so we all can move towards a perfect future ahead of us.

Better Future Prospects: Consider that net was not neutral, and then the likes of Google, Facebook or Zomato could

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XAVIER MATHIEU General Manager

Homerider Systems: Rendering IoT Solutions by Embedding the Need with Technology

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n todays’ world municipal corporations and industrial organizations are in a quandary state to sort out the problem of digitization of the water resources.

As an answer to their dilemmas, Homerider Systems has come-up with numerous tailor made IoT programs for the municipal, commercial and industrial customers by transforming their daily operations with digital water & energy services. Homerider’s IoT program focuses on the accurate collection of data and faster provision

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of precise solutions. Though, Homerider is already the talk of the town, and has created prominent footprints in the French market, it is looking forward with a projectile vision towards the future, and is deliberately expanding its international presence with the help of Veolia Group’s global reach.

Rendering Solutions with Modernism Homerider is dedicated towards delivering an interoperable ecosystem

of intelligent sensors, including meters, pressure and acoustic loggers, water quality probes and many more, within a single unified wireless network. For raising the bar of Digital Water Management, Homerider proudly shares its credits with Fusion Platform, which is a cloud based data management system concentrated on collecting cumulative data from all the devices unified under various connectivity networks. Fusion Platform outshines among other competitors by delivering accurate performance

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parameters including water balance, network efficiency and quality, thus supporting water operators to adopt smooth as well as the best water management practices. Going hand in hand with the Fusion application, Homerider is offering a cloud based data management platform and is currently supporting more than 5 million smart devices of its industrial as well as municipal customers.

Being agile is Homerider’s strength, they are working on expanding its business over various domains, Homerider has not only worked on water management, but also in building energy monitoring and Tank Level Monitoring for oil & gas industry. They also provide integrated solution for Smart Water & Energy Networks with daily accurate performance indicators and digital monitoring solutions with unrivaled TCO, delivering useful IoT experience to various sizes of industries and municipalities.

Envisioning the Need of IoT After serving for 10 years in the telecommunication industry, Xavier Mathieu, jumped into the IoT industry with a mission to bring significant changes in the industry with his innovative ideas. In the year 2010, Xavier joined Homerider as the Director of International Sales, but soon with his significant growth outcomes Xavier took over the General Management of Homerider in 2015, , in order to transform Homerider to become the worldwide reference of Environmental IoT. Under Xavier’s guidance Homerider Systems has been heavily involved in optimizing environmental resources. Their extensive portfolio of robust and non-intrusive smart sensors allows them to create turnkey solutions to promote a cost efficient, energy efficiency and performance oriented solution.

Evolving with the Evolution At Homerider, they strongly believe that municipal and industrial customers are ready to switch to the online monitoring solutions if and only if the proposal satisfies the magical quadrant of “best price, best connectivity SLA, best range, and best lifespan with minimum 10 years of lifetime.” With LoRaWAN, Sigfox and NB-IoT arriving, Homerider is all set to grab the opportunity to deliver compliant solution for municipal and industrial sectors.

Working in parallel with the designing of connected objects delivering the right amount of useful data, they are also

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working on the dataset and payload per connected objects, which would tend to be the objective differentiator for users. After undergoing rigorous R&D, the Homerider team could get into a solution that, industrial enterprises need fast and accurate operational data, while municipal buyers are eager to have a long lasting solution with reliable SLA. But, LPWAN/IoT must result in adaptive yet high performing and useful package in order to satisfy both slow as well as fast business cases.

Setting up Milestones while Marching Towards Success With KAPTA solution, Homerider raises the bar for Water Quality Monitoring standards. This solution was successfully implemented during the COP21 conference to secure the water network from terrorist attacks. Being a unique partnership between public and private entities to enable the uninterrupted surveillance of the water quality within the drinking water networks, the security system acquired high praises in the global platform. With the success at COP21, they presented the system to the Moroccan authorities in the next conference at COP22.

Overcoming the Challenges with Passion Detecting the presence of pollution elements is a great task of its kind. With Homerider’s solution, the identification of the substances used in the event of voluntary pollution has become an easy task. By this way, the Homerider’s solution can not only detect the issues on the water network, but also can locate and decrypt the chain of events to lead a fast and adapted corrective action. Homerider Systems goes one step further than just collecting data and offering a global solution to help the management for their network. Their services guide client’s decisions in terms of maintenance and management of their assets.

Buckling-up for the Future At Homerider, they believe in upcoming IoT adoption in the municipal market. With their out-of-the-box offers and far sighted vision, they expect to achieve their goal and become the one and only worldwide reference for Environmental IoT. Taking it as a challenge, Homerider is working hard towards creative teamwork, thus working together with their clients in order to deliver simple, useful yet cost effective IoT experiences. www.homeridersystems.com

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ALAN GRAU President & Co-founder

Icon Labs: Building the Internet of Secure Things

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he IoT has grown tremendously as an industry in a very short span of time. But still, it faces many complications with its security. In this regard, presently the biggest challenges are scalability on two different levels. First, the capability of Identity & Access Management solutions and Security Management solutions to support the billions of devices that will be deployed as part of the IoT. Second, the design of endpoint security solutions to scale down into the smallest IoT endpoint devices. To deal with these and other similar complications, security providers like

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Icon Labs have emerged. Icon Labs provides endpoint security and identity management solutions to enable OEMs to add security quickly and easily to their IoT connected devices and machines. These solutions include IoT Identity and Access Management, data protection for IoT devices, and intrusion detection and protection for IoT devices.

addressed throughout the system.�

A Company providing Security Building Blocks Icon Labs is a privately held corporation headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa. They have been providing solutions for embedded OEMs since 1992 with more than 100 customers worldwide.

Icon Labs has been renowned as a promising alliance because they believe that, “For the IoT to successfully move from proof-ofconcept projects to commercial deployments, security must be

Icon Labs is focused on creating the Internet of Secure Things. They provide software toolkits and security solutions to enable embedded OEMs and IoT device manufacturers to build security into their device. The team at

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Icon Labs is uniquely focused on resource-limited IoT devices – devices that cannot run large, sophisticated security solutions requiring operating systems like Windows, Linux, IoS, etc.

Their solutions support all major embedded OSes and RTOSes with security modules designed specifically for use in limited resource environments characteristic of the embedded marketspace. These solutions provide security building blocks for protecting the device itself rather than just relying on security at the perimeter.

Pioneer of Icon Labs Alan Grau is the President and Co-founder of Icon Labs and the architect of Icon Labs’ award-winning Floodgate firewall. Alan has an MS in computer science from Northwestern University. With his 25 years of embedded software experience, Alan has been leading Icon Labs to the pinnacle since its inception. Prior to founding Icon Labs, he worked for AT&T Bell Labs and Motorola.

Fulfilling Unique Requirements of the IoT Icon Labs is focused on building security solutions specifically for the IoT. Rather than customizing enterprise and desktop security solutions according to new needs, Icon Labs builds solutions specifically to meet the unique requirements of the IoT. Icon Labs builds embedded products to solve unique problems, and as such, often require custom solutions.

Even though their products provide the foundational security capabilities, many OEMs need more – they need to integrate with custom security management systems, detect and block unique threats, or make other extensions to the base products to meet the unique security requirements of their products.

In these situations, Icon Labs’ engineering team implements the product extensions and integrates with the embedded applications, shaving months off their schedule and significantly reducing development cost. Furthermore, these service groups enable their customers to leverage the experience and knowledge of their engineering team.

Recent Innovations Icon Labs is rolling out its IoT Identity and Access

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Management solutions that adds to their industry leading security solutions. These new capabilities include the Floodgate Certificate Authority and Floodgate PKI Client.

The CA provides complete certificate management for companies choosing to implement their own certificatebased authentication using public key infrastructure.

It provides industrial OEMs the ability to securely inject keys into their manufactured devices before they leave the factory and to operate as a private certificate authority, enabling secure certificate distribution and management for the millions of industrial and IoT devices currently being developed.

The Floodgate PKI Client enables IoT devices to generate keys, create certificate signing requests, and retrieve signed certificates from the CA. The client supports SCEP, EST, and OCSP and supports all RTOSes, embedded Linux, and Windows platforms.

Icon Labs as a Promising Alliance As projects move from proof-of-concept to deployments at scale, companies are beginning to address security requirements, particularly device identity and authentication. Icon Labs has extended their end-point security solution by adding Identity and Access Management capability for IoT devices.

Furthermore, the team at Icon Labs consists of security experts who help assess the security posture of the current devices or the design for the next generation system. This team can review the customer’s existing product implementation or design against industry standard security practices and help develop a plan to ensure the security of the device.

Taking pride in their work and the success they have achieved through providing world class services, Alan asserts, “We have been building intelligent, secure, networked devices for industry leaders in the Industrial Control, Critical Infrastructure, Military/Aerospace, Telecommunications, Networking and Medical Equipment industries for over 20 years. Our solutions are at work every day, from the factory floor to broadband Internet access devices, from core network routers to smart modems, and from optical cross-connects to the operating room.” www.iconlabs.com

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PAUL BULLOCK Head of IoT

JT Joining Devices Together

Leaders’ Thoughts Paul Bullock, JT’s Head of IoT, and Toby Gasston, Head of Service Delivery, started this line of business within JT in 2013. Paul brings

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perspective from a career in Technical Business Development at every level of the network stack, including startup experience in Canada, Bermuda and Jersey. He believes that network technology is solving countless real world problems, including Co2 emissions, crop yields, assisted living, efficient resource allocation, global income disparity and dozens of others.

M2M and IoT, in particular, demonstrate material improvement in lifestyles and environmental impacts.

The team JT has assembled over the past several years is comprised of technical professionals with diverse backgrounds. JT’s recently announced partnership with Copenhagen’s NeoConsult, headed by Rune Bundesen, provides customers a further layer of unrivalled depth in high-end software development capability.

IoT Solutions and Integrations JT’s IoT capability is a global horizontal connectivity solution, providing an integrated billing and

device diagnostic platform. Uniquely, JT’s NOMAD platform delivers multinetwork unsteered open roaming for cellular connections. It also provides complete API integration and allows its users to construct, provision, bill and monitor complete IoT solutions.

NOMAD is a workflow engine that assembles all the many components of an IoT solution via API to third parties, allowing automated and controlled provisioning of point of sale, building controls, tracking/telemetry and security solutions. NOMAD also integrates LoRa and Wi-Fi connectivity for “single pane of glass” visibility of hybrid estates.

Globally Dispersed Customer JT s customers are global and diverse; everything from direct corporates, to integrators in the UK, USA, Denmark, Netherlands, Malta, Australia, Africa and beyond. The company also serves verticals such as smart metering, vehicle tracking, usage-based insurance, mHealth, point of sale, smart advertising, shopper intelligence and encrypted mobile communications. ‘

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T is a Tier 1 full services telecoms operator based in Jersey, Channel Islands. The company has the vision to be a premium provider of global wireless data as well as a key platform enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ultimately to be the partner of choice for global telecoms innovation. JT’s approach is to provide connectivity around cellular, Wi-Fi, and LoRa, networks, but importantly, to provide a platform in which the various “molecules” that comprise a compound IoT offering can be provisioned, managed, invoiced and automated. The company does this through 600+ global roaming partners, the NOMAD workflow engine and connectivity management portal. JT’s IoT division demonstrated 128% growth in 2016, and 2017 promises to be equally exciting.

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We’re commi ed to providing a complete package, from bespoke communica on solu ons to unrivalled customer support

Unique Services JT’s services are unique due to truly global coverage (utilizing 600+ roaming agreements), open roaming, and an extremely competitive price point. The company offers all the flexibility and technical agility of a sophisticated IoT integrator, with the global reach and network power of a Mobile Network Operator. JT has over 120 years’ of heritage as the incumbent operator in the Channel Islands and is owned as a strategic asset by the local Government, the States of Jersey, so the customers have the security of long-term viability. NOMAD is a unique platform for building IoT solutions based on connectivity, but extending into provisioning, monitoring and diagnosing third party applications and devices.

Clients benefit from robust support, commercial and technical flexibility, unique features for real-time connectivity diagnostics and 24/7 support.

Challenges as Advantages JT has identified four key industry challenges and found a solution for each of them: The first challenge is the automation of provisioning complex, multi-vendor and multi-component solutions. JT solves this with its NOMAD workflow engine and connectivity management platform.

Commercial flexibility over the life of the device is the second challenge. It’s hard for an enterprise to take the commercial risk of installing a SIM into a device that lasts 10 years, when they don’t know if their connectivity provider is going to reduce prices in line with prevailing industry norms or even if they’re going to raise prices. JT solves this by assisting OEMs and others with deploying new SIM profiles (new network identities) over the air, when better costs for connectivity are achieved by the customer. This means JT is saying, “you don’t have to use JT for the life of the device if you can get a better deal, and we’ll help with that.”

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satellite, etc., all contend for the connectivity layer with different properties on the matrix. As IoT solution providers face this maze, it’s important if not critical they partner with organisations that are contemplating and acting on these developments in real-time; JT’s IoT team does that.

Finally, it is critical that device identity, authentication, message encryption and data integrity are guaranteed from the point of device provisioning for the life of the device.

JT’s investment in security is significant and sustained.

Keeping Up with the Future of IoT Sector The future of the IoT sector is one of hybrid deployments, changing technologies, and partner alliances. JT is preparing for all this by developing a connectivity-agnostic management platform that also connects different providers to a given solution. Cellular still has a bright future in IoT and JT’s global offering matches and exceeds the market leaders and will continue to do so, especially while new roaming agreements are continually added.

The company is in the last stages of developing an automated end-to-end encryption solution. This will provide managed “Cloud PKI.” Upon first activation, NOMAD will trap the IMEI of the device, dispatch a keypair to the device and to the target server, and thereby establish end-to-end closed user group encryption from the device’s first activation. This will be independent of any server infrastructure whether Amazon, IBM or in-house. It will ensure a critical component of the security stack is in place regardless of other solution components that may change over time. With JT, IoT solutions providers are not tied down in any way over the life of the device, as the company is establishing an open connectivity environment.

Website: www.jtglobal.com/wholesale LinkedIn: JT Group Limited Twitter: @jt_business

Diversity of media, which is the third challenge, is a matrix that guides connectivity choice. The matrix consists of the value of data, cost of data, throughput requirement and module cost. Cellular, LoRa, NBIoT, RPMA, Sigfox,

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CXO Standpiont

Innovative Wearables for Health Benefits

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nnovative wearables that are user-friendly and unobtrusive offer efficient care, while reducing costs and stress. These wearable medical devices are “connected” devices, with features such as wireless data transmission, real-time feedback, alerting mechanism, and more. The miniaturization of wireless communication and sensor technology, combined with more power efficiency and greater computation capabilities, all of which GTX Corp has been at the forefront both in technical development and patent filings, has enabled the shift of clinical monitoring beyond facilities to personal at home caregiving. Wearable medical devices will also become helpful to pharmaceutical companies for conducting efficient clinical trials to gather data remotely, and for insurers to provide outcome-based reimbursement.

As the global wearable devices market continues to gain momentum and is projected to reach US$4.5 billion by 2020, innovative wearable devices such as the GPS SmartSoles are helping drive that growth.

- Patrick Bertagna, Chief Executive Officer, Founder and Chairman, GTX Corp

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The rapid growth rate can also be attributed to the fact that roughly six million elderly Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s or Dementia and over 100 million people require oversight due to various forms of memory impairment that includes Alzheimer, Dementia, Autism, and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to “The 2013 World Alzheimer’s Report”, this number is expected to increase to 277 million by 2050 with 70% of the memory impaired becoming lost three or more times.The biggest challenge for most caregivers has been the ability to keep track of an individual’s whereabouts on a daily basis and prevent a patient from wandering off and getting lost. When a memory impaired person wanders, it can create havoc for caregivers who are ultimately responsible for the safety of their patient or loved one. Typically, 46% of wanderers who are not found within 24 hours are at a higher risk of death.

With new strides in wearable technology advancements being made every day; the ability to track a person has become easier and less cumbersome; ultimately resulting in less deaths.

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SZYMON NIEMCZURA Co-Founder & CEO

Kontakt.io: Building Beacon-Enabled Solutions

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oT & beacons are developing technologies, so the companies providing these services must make the decisions as they move forward. Few of the current beacon companies are effectively shaping the future of the industry with each new release, and that is a dangerous scenario. Companies can’t just guess what will be practical, they must be sure about their decisions. They must understand the customer’s need.

Kontakt.io is an IoT and beacons service provider who turns to their customers and asks them what they didn’t love about their beacons – even their Kontakt.io beacons, to take this technology to the next level.

Empowering Organizations by Providing Beacon Solutions Kontakt.io empowers businesses by bridging the gap between real and digital. They are pushing the Internet of Things revolution forward by

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connecting proximity-aware devices to the cloud.

Kontakt.io was originally founded with the goal of helping the visually impaired navigate public spaces.

Today, headquartered in Kraków with offices in Berlin, Guadalajara, and New York, they share their best-in-class beacon infrastructure solutions and expertise to empower every organization on the planet to realize its full potential.

Future IoT solutions will be built on beacons, and Kontakt.io team is proud to be a thriving leader in that space.

Pilot of Kontakt.io Szymon Niemczura, is the Cofounder and CEO at Kontakt.io. As a strong advocate of the Internet of Things idea, he runs the company to be among the leaders of the upcoming connected future. He graduated in

Business Management & Financial Management from National Louis University.

When it comes to business, Szymon always looks for new challenges that bring a fundamental improvement in their space. He has been working on a variety of cutting-edge projects since 2009. Using that experience, he shares his passion for IoT and beacon technology during conferences and workshops around the world. After work Szymon is a passionate glider pilot.

Building the Most Advanced Solutions Kontakt.io is the world’s biggest beacon provider with 17,000 customers in over 120 countries all around the globe. They work in B2B model, providing beacon solution providers, mobile agencies as well as software houses with beacon hardware and

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Future IoT solu ons will be built on beacons,

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a thriving leader in that space

software to help them build the beacon-enabled apps that their clients love.

Kontakt.io has developed a number of different types of beacon hardware as well as robust beacon software to help their clients build, deploy, and scale up their proximity solutions. When Google launched Eddystone in 2015, Kontakt.io was one of the few companies that was involved in the project and developed the first beacons with Eddystone support. One year later, Kontakt.io released four new products that represent a new generation in how the industry leverages beacons. Among recently introduced hardware there is the thinnest complete Bluetooth Smart device in the world—Card Beacon, the most advanced beacon hardware—Beacon Pro, and Gateway, which combined with Location Engine (a new software tool) not only provides the ability to monitor the movement and status of beacons in real time but also to cause a number of actions based on location—and all that—without a smartphone.

Proximity Studio: The World’s First Beacon Showroom Beacon infrastructure providers are the missing puzzle piece both within companies and the beacon space. Industry needs beacon solutions that help enterprises put beacon technology into action. Everyone needs the bridges from idea to POC to deployment. That is why Kontakt.io has opened its Proximity Studio, the world’s first Beacon Showroom and complete beacon IoT consulting service provider.

Kontakt.io’s team of dedicated Solution Architects combines cutting edge resources and use cases with business acumen to aid key decision makers in finding the right beacon-based solution. Leveraging their online and offline portals, Kontakt.io provides the resources to integrate proximity technology quickly and have already worked with brands around the globe.

businesses and solution providers. They bring together all parts of the beacon technology chain in order to establish beneficial business partnerships and mold the future of the industry.

Proximity Studio consulting offers insight for every stage of development and acts as the personal interface to market knowledge. The team of industry specialists expedites POC projects, offer high-level insight on beacon-based initiatives, and assess the technical feasibility of new projects.

Building the Future of Beacon Ecosystem Since 2013, the team of Kontakt.io has focused on providing businesses with the best technology, so they could focus on their core goals and solutions. In 2017 and in the following years, they will continue to do the same.

“We want the entire Bluetooth ecosystem to grow, and we can make that happen by creating the right tools,” shares Szymon.

The future of beacon use cases extends far beyond retail.

This is precisely why Kontakt.io has created the Location Engine, and will continue to nurture such products in coming years. They are striving to make it easy and costeffective to track assets and people. “We plan to help you collect and use meaningful data without investing time and development dollars on hardware or cloud back-ends,” adds Szymon. “Businesses should spend time and money on customers, not building an infrastructure from the ground up. This is how we can grow the beacon ecosystem together.” www.kontakt.io

Leveraging their position as beacon industry leaders, Proximity Studio has created a network of innovative

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KEITH FLYNN President & Founder

RtTech Software: A Leading Industrial Apps Provider

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he Industrial IoT is often labelled as being disruptive.

This implies that the technology is disruptive to the environment in which it is entering.

This notion is completely erroneous.

Industrial IoT allows for the implementation of Industrial Analytic software and Big Data in a facility or operation without being intrusive to the existing infrastructure. RtTech can go into older plants and drop-in their Cipher IoT solution without interfering with (or disrupting) existing controls and processes. They achieve this, nonintrusive and non-disruptive implementation with drop-in wireless and add-on sensors using today’s newest edge technologies. This allows their customers regardless of the age of their industrial controls, the ability to leverage the power of IIoT.

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Facilitating Operational Intelligence RtTech Software is a leading Industrial Apps provider, helping global clients in the manufacturing, mining, and power generation industries to increase productivity and decrease energy consumption through operational intelligence.

Industrial apps from RtTech Software aggregate machine and sensor data from across the production process and use advanced analytics to provide operational intelligence in context via an intuitive dashboard. The solutions integrate within the areas of the operation with the biggest bottom line impact – asset utilization and utilities consumption. Benefits include the ability to empower operators with realtime Data, maximize production capacity, improve product quality,

reduce downtime and unplanned stoppag, and optimize utilities consumption to lower energy costs.

RtTech solutions are deployed in over 80+ sites throughout 26 different countries.

Apps for Industrial Analytics RtTech Software develops and markets Industrial Apps that provide Operational Intelligence that run on an IoT platform, Cipher. RtTech’s Cipher kick-starts IoT projects and uncovers the opportunities of a connected data platform for industrial clients. Connect every asset, sensor, MES, and ERP data source that drives your operation with a flexible Industrial IoT platform.

RtTech offers two main app solutions – RtDUET, a real-time software app designed to improve asset availability | March 2017

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and utilization in industrial facilities like manufacturing, mining, and power generation, and RtEMIS, an energy management information system designed to help industrial facilities reduce energy consumption.

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the ten-figure mark. One reason for this growth is that the combination of Industrial IoT and Big Data analytics promises to continue to improve operational efficiency and innovation, which will ultimately unearth new revenue streams for manufacturers.

Leading Light of RtTech Software Keith Flynn, President and Founder of RtTech Software, is an integral part of the development of both RtDUET and RtEMIS. By trade, Keith is a certified Professional Engineer, with a B. Eng in Electrical Engineering, as well as a B. Science and Certificate of Applied Science. Though modest regarding the achievement, Keith is also a prestigious Sexton Scholar at Dalhousie University.

Although the future appears bright, the seemingly endless potential of the Industrial IoT is by no means a guarantee.

In order for the innovations of the Industrial IoT to thrive, there needs to be a significant consumer and government buy-in. Government support and funding is often crucial in helping companies invest in new technology.

With over 16 years of industry experience, Keith is also a principal partner at ADM Systems Engineering, an implementation partner of RtTech. This insight helps Keith and his product development team ensure that RtTech’s products integrate the latest technical capabilities and deliver the most effective results for their customers.

The RtTech Software team is preparing themselves by working with as many edge device hardware vendors as possible, using as many new and legacy industrial protocols as they can support. This is enabling them to understand the processes of all the vertices of the industry. “We want a truly drop-in solution for almost any situation,” says Keith.

They are adding more and more relevant protocols with a high focus on wireless connectivity.

Success Stories RtTech has successfully helped many companies streamline their business. For instance, AGL, one of Australia’s leading energy companies, faced challenges due to rapid growth, inefficiency to share data across several sites. They chose RtTech and installed RtDUET for asset management.

Multiple site installation, integration with existing process log-books, and Standardized KPI calculation across sites have ultimately resulted in 5% data accuracy gain.

Focused on things like MQTT, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Thread; RtTech is working hard to be efficient and secure in cellular, satellite, LoRaWAN and other data transmission methods. “We want to be the Industrial IoT Edge Connector first. If we can own the connectivity space, then we can move into providing apps as necessary,” concluded Keith. www.rttechsoftware.com

Similarly, with a large food and beverage manufacturer, RtDUET enabled real-time detection of downtimes events and production slowdowns. RtDUET is installed in 30+ such plants and is ready to be installed in 190+ plants by the end of 2017. RtTech Software’s 2500 installations in 25+ different countries are helping clients like these to increase productivity and reduce energy waste.

Preparing for the Future of IoT Sector As IIoT innovations continue to develop, it is expected that the number of connected devices will multiply to well over

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CXO Standpoint

THE MOST COST EFFECTIVE WAY TO BUILD AN “IT” BRAND

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n today’s data-driven tech world, it appears the priority is all about the speed of innovation and how we move data safely, effectively, efficiently and securely. But if no one knows about your solution, how will they purchase and use it?

For those of you who wish to grow in this broad-based IT market, and can strategically plan, there is simply no more cost-effective investment than PR to help establish an organization and its innovations in the very noisy marketplace in which we all compete.

In such a world of amazing tech innovation, if we don’t control the story of what we do and what we make, the story will control us.

Think about the FAKE NEWS ripping through our social media every day.

Bob Gold Founder, President & CEO Bob Gold & Associates

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CXO Standpoint

Today we communicate in a virtual three-dimensional level of game-like complexity -- we do more and more on mobile, while managing larger and larger databases of friends and associates on multiple platforms, while multitasking in simultaneous discussions. In other words, it’s noisy out there! Worse still, we usually can’t remember the source of information we share.

How noisy is it, you may ask? Ÿ By some counts, the number of marketing technology solutions has doubled since 2015 and will soon surpass 4,000. Ÿ Today’s executives are overwhelmed by the amount of technology choices and confused by vendor claims that their platform can do it all. Before investing in more technology, they want to optimize what they already own.

This brings us back to the role of PR in technology. Technology can’t speak for itself. If we want folks to adapt and use our innovations, they must be educated about the benefits they bring.

The process of storytelling requires a specialized PR discipline to break beyond the noise buzzing with clichés: “We have an endto-end solution” (isn’t that what you get when you mix salt with water and stir?); “We are Best-of-Class” (which rarely comes with a degree or grade point average); or one of my favorites--the promise to be able to monetize technology investments.

Just consider: Ÿ Security – Everybody is hacking everyone else – if it can be made, it can be broken. How can you tell the market, with specificity, that your security system addresses this issue? Ÿ Lack of Policies - Exploding quantities of data zapped into hidden clouds, without access and use policies means we have

a big problem. Big Data and real-time analytics are super sexy in 2017, (thanks Alexa!) and for an on-demand world where all content is supposed to be available anytime, this will be big! How will you take advantage of this building trend? Ÿ Content Protection – This takes us to a world where everything is on-demand and connected. How will “autonomous

everything” work? In a world facing more confusion than certainty, there is an “opportunity ahead” street sign in your path to address this overwhelming and often confusing situation.

So following are some key dos, don’ts and cautions. Caveat emptor – reader beware! There is no one-size-fits-all for every situation, but there are some general rules of thumb that when followed will generate success: 1) START WITH A CLEAR MESSAGE: PR is all about your core message, positioned as a story with a beginning, middle and end – that's just good construction. Good storytelling starts with a clear message.

2) DO SAY WHAT ELSE MAKES YOUR COMPANY DIFFERENT Can you answer these questions about your company and about your product? Ÿ

What are the three core messages about your company?

1. You might think about your founders and executive leadership 2. Are you the most complete (Gulp! I’m gonna say it) solution? Serving which market areas?

3. What problems do you solve for today? Are you visionary and future proof?

3) DO VALIDATE YOUR STORY WITH NUMBERS: What are the most profound messages about your product/service?

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CXO Standpoint

Can you describe your product more succinctly than, “it’s non-disruptive to install?” State your big customer benefit -- for example is it 50% better than anything else on the market? – Does it consume 50% less bandwidth?

Or … think about describing your product validated by numbers and in measurable scope.

This brings us back to PR. All connections start with sharing good stories. Breaking through isn’t as simple as sending an email to a reporter, calling a friend or telling one colleague who has 2,000 followers on Twitter. It takes diligence and the ability to find new ways to tell your story over and over again.

The case for storytelling has never been more powerful. Your space has never been more competitive and the noise about other companies’ tech options is deafening.

PR is the secret sauce that re-interprets the science in human and business benefits that can drive change. Sure, one-on-one word of mouth is powerful, but for businesses, nothing beats engaging, resonant, pervasive, quotable stories, as presented by your experienced PR professional. And PR will beat any other investment as the most cost effective tool in your sales and marketing arsenal.

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| March 2017

SANJIT BISWAS CEO

Samsara: Internet Connected Sensors

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he technology stack used in IoT seems complex because of its exponential curve of advancements. But, the fact is that it is a mere innovative model of sensors, data analytics, and internet, which connects things to make smart decisions. The developments of semiconductor manufacturing have cut the cost and size of the sensors, the wireless internet connectivity has reached every place of the globe, and the data analytics has become a gamechanger in the technology aspect.

However, traditional enterprise-scale sensor systems still require the complex infrastructure, which covers a wide range – from hard-wired networks to servers, middleware, and custom code.

A Walk Around Samsara Samsara is an Industrial Internet of Things company that helps customers leverage sensor data to improve their

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efficiency, safety, and customer service. Samsara has developed a new generation of sensor data technology that comes at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, enabling customers to adopt sensor data throughout their operations.

Founding Business with Tech Ideas Sanjit Biswas is the co-founder and CEO of Samsara. The company makes it easier and more affordable for businesses to deploy sensors at a massive scale. Before Samsara, Sanjit was the CEO and co-founder of Meraki, one of the most successful networking companies of the past decade. Sanjit grew Meraki from his Ph.D. research into a complete enterprise networking portfolio, with cloud-based management that revolutionized the deployment of large networks. Meraki’s sales doubled every year since its inception, earning the company tens of thousands of

customers. In 2012, Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion. Under his leadership, Cisco Meraki continued to grow at over 100%, making it one of Cisco’s fastest growing product lines in history. “We are definitely not the first to notice the technology trend behind the Internet of Things movement, but we realized no one was building products the way we did at Meraki, by combining hardware, software, and cloud into an easy-to-use system. This is what got us really excited,” Sanjit said.

Sanjit has been recognized as a TR35 honoree by MIT Technology Review, a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and has received awards for academic research in computer networking. He also serves on the boards of ThousandEyes and Highfive Technologies, and is an investor in several startups. Sanjit holds a B.S. in Computer Systems

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We believe ease of deployment and ease of use will make a 10x impact in the world of sensing

Engineering from Stanford and an S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Simplifying Deployment and Operation Samsara disrupts the traditional sensor model with an integrated, software-centric solution. The products combine plug-and-play sensors, wireless connectivity, and rich cloud-hosted software, all tightly-integrated for simple deployment. Samsara is used by customers in a wide variety of industries, from transportation and logistics to energy and manufacturing. The company offers various solutions including fleet, ELD compliance, trailer, industrial, temperature, and power.

By focusing Samsara system for ease of use and streamlining deployments in the field, the teams were able to make several design choices that help them deliver a 10 times overall improvement over traditional solutions.

Simple installation: Each Samsara gateway includes a cellular radio that is pre-provisioned to work in over 150 countries, making it dramatically simpler to get connectivity to a new site, asset, or vehicle, versus building a custom network.

Powered by the cloud: By using a cloud-based architecture, they can scale from small to large deployments, and offer ongoing feature improvements every month. Plus, customers can easily pull live data for analysis or build their own views using built-in open APIs. Wide range of sensor inputs: Samsara offers data-logging wireless sensors, digital and analog inputs, and connectors for the sensors built into light and heavy duty vehicles, making it possible to easily collect data from nearly any source.

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operations. With ubiquitous sensors and intelligent software to capture and analyze their data, Samsara’s customers increase the efficiency of their operations, improve the safety of their workers, and enhance their customer service.

Challenges for IoT solution providers Customers are facing a barrage of new technology solutions. While customers today clearly understand the value of technology, dealing with reams of new data, and integrating many systems from different vendors can increase cost and complexity. Solution providers must focus on developing simple, integrated, and easy-to-deploy solutions so that customers can reap the benefits of new technology without undue cost and complexity.

Technology advancements are resulting in an explosive growth in sensor data. Sensors are becoming smaller and cheaper every year, creating millions of new data sources.

Traditional communications and software architectures simply cannot cope with data at this scale. Samsara has built a solution designed from the ground up to capture and analyze IoT sensor data, which prepares customers to harness the proliferation of sensor data to simplify their operations.

Future Expectations Samsara is experiencing tremendous growth, fueled by customer demand across many industries. The company will double in size this year, and will be introducing new hardware and software products across all its product families. www.samsara.com

Simple UI: An easy to understand interface, which makes the data accessible to a wider range of operational teams in any location.

The Benefits to the Customers With Samsara, customers gain deep visibility into their

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SHAWN CONAHAN Founder & CEO

Tellient: Providing Analytics for Things

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ost Analytics ďŹ rms don’t specialize in IoT. The ones that do are often pivots from other analytics like networking.

Of the few that do specialize in analyzing IoT data, no one goes beyond simply formatting the data to display in a dashboard. This is where Tellient plays its role. Tellient is the company that executes more than showing the information in a dashboard, and even more than making that information available to other smart things.

Tellient enables network operators to monetize the IoT data on their networks by transforming it into a sellable asset. The Tellient platform is a turn-key solution providing

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marketplace dynamics to generate revenue from data across the IoT ecosystem. Tellient is an analytics platform built speciďŹ cally for the Internet of Things. Their customers include connected device makers, providers of the technologies that power IoT devices, and the network operators that those devices connect through. They collect and process the enormous quantities of data generated by the IoT and turn it into a new revenue source for their customers.

Founder and CEO of Tellient Shawn Conahan is the Founder and CEO of Tellient. He has been an entrepreneur, senior executive and investor in the wireless, technology, and Internet industries for over 15

years. His industry experience ranges from digital media to wireless technology to big data, where the common thread has been building platforms with broad applicability.

Conahan graduated from California State University, Northridge with a BS degree in Business Administration.

Features of Tellient Platform There are 2 major parts of the Tellient Platform, 1) Tellient Analytics, which collects, inspects, and perfects the data and turns it into information using learning algorithms to provide descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. And the 2) Tellient Marketplace, which packages the information for sale as data feed APIs, suggests appropriate pricing based on

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Most businesses think of analy cs as a cost center, working with Tellient, with our focus on turning IoT data into revenue using analy cs, it is a profit center

market dynamics, connects sellers with buyers, handles the transaction, and provides the feeds to buyers.

The working of Tellient’s platform can be explained in three steps; 1) Tellient turns raw, usually unstructured and ugly IoT data into information; i.e, The Tellient Analytics platform collects the data traversing a carrier’s network and turns it into easy interpretable and actionable information by humans (via dashboards) and machines (via APIs).

2) Tellient turns this information into Revenue; i.e., The insights derived from the data on that network are turned into products that are sold in the Tellient Marketplace. 3) Tellient enables the creation of new business models using IoT data feeds; i.e., The availability of IoT data as an API gives developers a path to monetize IoT deployments indirectly.

Insights into the Future Conahan and his team are working to make connected devices, smart enough to make themselves smarter, and those devices are going out on the network to look for the most relevant information to make themselves smarter. The most useful information they will find will be historical and real-time IoT Analytics data from a cohort of other devices.

To understand this phenomenon, Conahan explained that in the future, while driving a car, the car will look at available weather data to determine the temperature. It will also know the altitude, pressure, and humidity. It will make adjustments to the engine to optimize performance by looking at other vehicles within and outside its manufacturer in a geospatially global cross-section based on similar circumstances. Then it will add what it learned from other cars’ experiences to its own actual experience and put that all back in the connected and distributed cloud of useful data for other cars to use in real time.

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Every selection of a cohort and application of data will become a case study indexed and findable by other machines, capable of applying and adapting or discarding best practices at nanosecond scale. The result will be continuous improvement through the application of shared experiences and learning that will enable devices to evolve at a pace and to an extent that human programmers could not achieve.

Tellient’s Role in Building the Future At the heart of all of it is IoT Analytics and the team at Tellient is taking what a device is doing and turning it into knowledge, insight, and ultimately, revenue. It can then be combined with other data to gain further valuable knowledge so that it can be provided to a machine to incorporate it into additional knowledge and insights to the collective knowledge base for all to benefit from.

This future is going to happen. The companies that stand to benefit the most are the ones that embrace the vision and build their product strategy around it, will be soonest to reap the greatest reward.

Furthermore, Tellient’s near term plans include several Proofs of Concepts (POCs) with major network operators & carriers in the US, Asia, and Europe. “Every customer, we turn up, Tellient gets “smarter” and the longer they run, the more our learning algorithms can improve. Because of this, the product is constantly evolving,” Conahan concludes. www.tellient.com

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JOAO BARROS Founder & CEO

Veniam:

Moving Massive Data between Vehicles and the Cloud

A

50 most disruptive companies in the world by CNBC, and received an award from TU Automotive Best Auto Mobility Product/Service.

Veniam builds a platform that turn any car, bus, or truck into part of an expanding and resilient wireless network that moves massive amounts of data between vehicles and the cloud.

Veniam is building and deploying today what they call the Internet of Moving Things. It is a part of the wireless infrastructure that will be required everywhere in the future. In 2016, Veniam was named as one of the

In addition to the standard challenges IoT is facing like of security, privacy, and reliable connectivity, Veniam’s team is also dealing with moving objects. As the number of IoT devices is growing by high order of magnitude, which also includes more and more vehicles (piloted today, driverless in the future). Current mobile networks are simply not designed to handle steel cages on wheels moving quickly, consuming and generating terabytes of data. An autonomous driving future depends on that data moving back and forth reliably between vehicles and the cloud, not just for the passengers

s we move closer to a driverless future, whether that is in a eet scenario, an industrial setting, or individual passenger cars, a new kind of infrastructure is required to ensure the security, safety and performance of all these autonomous vehicles and the people interacting with them.

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sitting inside, but also for the vehicles themselves to operate.

Designer of Veniam Joao Barros is one of the founders and the CEO of Veniam. Barros has been focused on making truly connected cars a reality since completing his PhD in 2004, and more recently as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal. He founded Veniam in 2012, to bring those ideas to the marketplace with the mission of making not just smarter vehicles, but smarter streets, neighborhoods, and cities. Barros believes that the key is building networks that can generate and analyze the right data to make better decisions about development, design, and efďŹ ciency.

| March 2017

The

20 Fastest

IoT

‘‘

Growing Companies

Veniam builds a pla orm that turns any car, bus, or truck into part of an expanding and resilient wireless network that moves massive amounts of data between vehicles and the cloud

‘‘

Solutions and Services Veniam builds a platform that delivers a wireless mesh network that turns any vehicle (or fixed piece of infrastructure) into a node on that network. The Veniam network is designed to move massive amounts of data both to and from vehicles. For passengers on a bus, that means enjoying high quality internet browsing, and video watching. For fleet operators, data is collected and sent, that monitors vehicles and the environment around them to provide better insight into operations or trigger specific events – maybe call for a mechanic, unload a full trash bin, or reroute a bus.

Innovative-Robust Service Veniam clients include passenger bus fleet owners, car manufacturers and OEMs of industrial vehicles and machines. The latter includes fleet owners that send out trucks for installation, maintenance, and delivery. Veniam customers also include cities and port authorities operating their own equipment. What makes the networks themselves unique – robust, resilient, not dependent on any one “flavor” of wireless technology – makes the outcomes unique. Because, Veniam’s networks can generate and move more data, in places like Singapore, Mexico City, and New York City. Veniam customers are now getting insights that can help them better design not just their business and government operations, but the cities of the future.

At the same time, Veniam’s network collects and moves the data that can help fleet operators reduce costs by running routes more efficiently, safely, and flagging any unusual events, whether that is identifying a bad driver or a passenger in need of help.

Future Prospect and Scenario Team Veniam thinks that the vast majority of children born this year – 2017 – will never learn to drive. If that is true, 16 or so years down the road, one of the key components of IoT in the future – the car – will need to be completely redesigned. For that they are preparing for it by anticipating the needs of the infrastructure that will be required in that driverless future.

More innovation and more deployments of Veniam mesh networks are seen around the world. They are already in places in Europe, Asia, and North America, and what those networks enable is an acceleration of what they, and their customers, are learning, because the bigger these networks get the more robust they become. You can expect that flywheel – combining networks, data and insight – to spin faster. www.veniam.com

Veniam is recognized internationally by the high-tech and automotive industry for its innovativeness and disruptive solutions.

Benefits For Customers For the public or private buses, the Veniam solution not only offer high quality connectivity onboard – a better experience for passenger – but opens up new revenue opportunities for in-vehicle and on-vehicle advertising tailored to location, time, and day.

March 2017 |

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