Axeda Corp. today broadened its campaign to deliver machine-to-machine connectivity to manufacturers worldwide, announcing the SmartLink Platform for connecting to wired and wireless assets.
The SmartLink Platform represents both a decoupling of and an upgrade to Axeda’s existing technology. With the new offering, the company has taken the core of its SmartService product, stripped away the associated asset management applications, and delivered the black box to customers, allowing them to create their own brand of asset management applications. The SmartLink Platform also includes a new wrinkle: the ability to track wireless assets.
Using the platform, manufacturers, independent software vendors, and other technology developers can create applications that monitor dispersed assets — in some cases to monitor their own assets; in other instances to provide value-added services to customers of their products. Indeed, the emergence of machine-to-machine technology has enabled a new world of post-sales service for many manufacturers, which can now use products such as Axeda’s to create links to products in the field.
The latest Axeda offering necessitated some new partnerships, according to Brian Anderson, Axeda’s vice president of marketing. In order to expand the technology to cover wireless assets, Axeda needed to forge alliances with two types of companies, he told Managing Automation in an interview today. Providers such as Bug Labs, Enfora, and Janus Communications build the boxes or microchips that allow a piece of equipment to collect data and communicate over a wireless network, while the likes of Wyless and Kore Telematics act as a front end to the wireless network carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, adding additional capabilities such as GSM, HSPA, CDMA and EV-DO communications.
Yet another partner helped Axeda identify the need for a wired/wireless asset management platform. “What we found, along with our partner Deloitte, is that [there are] enterprise-scale systems where you really want to be able to transform your business, not just look at one department, one division that has an issue, but look at the whole company and say, ‘How can I take advantage of this smart connection to connect to all my assets?’ ”
“What this new announcement does is it lets us also [provide connectivity] for manufacturers that make things that move or are remote,” Anderson said. “Now we can talk to people that make construction equipment or people that make mobile trailers for doing things in oil and gas or … around power generation,” for instance.
The SmartLink Platform itself remains application-neutral. Anderson did not reveal an average cost of deployment, but said the offering is priced either on the basis of number of users or the number of assets to be tracked.