1248, the Internet of Things (IoT) company is to focus on IoT Device Management and plans to launch a new product this year. Device Management includes the monitoring of estates of connected devices – gateways and edge devices such as temperature sensors – providing live status summaries, up-time reporting and triage. It also provides automated management of devices through their life-cycle from secure onboarding through software upgrades to end-of-life.
“We’ve had a productive first 18 months, launching three major initiatives with key partners,” said 1248 CEO Pilgrim Beart. “During that time the IoT landscape has started to settle out and it’s now clear that an area of real pain is Device Management, where we have a lot of unique experience. IoT devices live in the real world, which is a messy place, so for every one way an IoT device can work, there are a hundred ways it can fail; for example, due to communications problems, dead batteries, or software bugs. Device Management is all about managing these issues so that our customers – service providers with connected product propositions in energy, lighting, traffic management etc. – can focus their skills on delivering unique value, rather than on managing infrastructure.”
1248’s executives have substantial experience born out of several connected-product companies such as AlertMe, Actix and Amino, each of which succeeded in scaling into the millions of deployed devices. “That process wasn’t always easy,” reflects 1248 COO Keith Reed; “In retrospect, each of these companies probably spent the majority of its time delivering and managing infrastructure, rather than on actually delivering its headline proposition. We’ve realised that this is the norm across the whole of today’s IoT community, which is inefficient and is inhibiting growth. So by delivering a Device Management service we can free up our customers to focus on their ‘value-add’ – their connected product devices and applications.”
IoT applications are very diverse, but generally revolve around increasing the efficiency of utilisation of a finite and valuable resource such as parking spaces, energy or human time. 1248’s customers are companies who provide these kinds of services.
