New IoT Gateway supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, with cellular and other IoT access technologies also configurable
The enterprise market, despite facing numerous challenges in adoption, is embracing IoT solutions as a way to better monitor assets and gain operational efficiencies and savings. A persistent pain point is finding a solution that can integrate with legacy systems in a way that’s simple enough for an IT department to manage.
This is the problem Harman is trying to address with its new IoT Gateway product, which Vice President for Technology, Partnerships and New Solutions for Harman Connected Services Andrew Till discussed in a recent interview with Enterprise IoT Insights.
When addressing the enterprise market, “Things need to just work. We wanted to bring a technology that was already well-proven in the marketplace. Then we’ve also enhanced the ability to run data analytics on the gateway. We thought there were a lot of use cases where you don’t really need to be sending data into the cloud, you can do this locally.”
Till described three “layers of complexity” in IoT deployments: the wireless technology, the protocol and the data architecture. “We’re looking at the data topology of the sensors and the devices that the gateway is connected to and try to put that into a consistent structure.What we try to do is say if we can provide a range of different wireless options on the gateway, and have the sensors effectively self-configuring, we can at least remove that challenge of the wireless protocol.”
The auto-configuration of sensors is based on an onboard database. Till explained that R&D process: “We try to get our hands on some of the most popular sensors people are using, and test them with the gateway. Then we store them in the gateway so when people are setting them up for the first time, it simplifies the installation process. One of the things we’ve learned is in many IoT scenarios, it’s not an IT professional…so anything you can do to remove to simplify the configuration.”
