An Industrial IoT platform is a rapidly growing segment of IoT technology comprising a collection of functions for edge device management, IoT data analytics, modern sensor technologies and connectivity solutions that enhance industrial equipment and industrial operations with remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and extensive device data analytics.
On a broader scale, an Industrial IoT platform is a key enabler of Industry 4.0, otherwise known as smart factory, which combines modern cloud computing, IIoT and AI to create intelligent, self-optimizing industrial equipment and production facilities.
When considering the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) from a practical business perspective, manufacturing companies that implement IIoT enjoy increased value to customers and improved cost-efficiency of internal operations. For example, devices with smart features minimize field service effort and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by allowing for remote performance monitoring, issue investigation, and troubleshooting. Furthermore, in an IoT enabled factory where individual but interdependent components of a production line are aware of each other’s activity in near real time, the entire manufacturing process becomes more efficient and much easier to monitor and administer.
Additionally, IIoT promotes flexibility through open architectures that support customization and streamlined software upgrades across tens of thousands of devices. All these benefits of Industrial IoT have encouraged equipment manufacturers to produce new equipment models that include smart features out of the box.
Kaa is an enterprise IoT platform, which has been also extensively used as an Industrial IoT platform, that functions as a cloud application manager for connected industrial production facilities. One key feature of Kaa is that it is hardware and transport-agnostic, which enables it to easily integrate with a broad variety of sensors, controllers, machines and device gateways in order to readily support any existing industrial infrastructure.
Once in place, Kaa can provision new devices, manage their lifecycle, receive and store telematics and sensor data in the cloud, execute remote commands, run over the air (OTA) updates, analyze device data and create rules for smart alerts.
Kaa’s out-of-the-box connectivity and data processing features utilize popular protocols such as MQTT and can be used together with popular data management systems and databases to integrate with your existing backend.
Kaa’s open APIs simplify integration and DevOps tasks, allowing you to rapidly assemble end-to-end IoT applications for industrial system automation, predictive maintenance, and remote monitoring. Kaa also features a user-friendly web dashboard tool for configuring data visualization widgets that perform production monitoring routines.