IoT | Internet of Things

What are the main components of an IoT solution?

A typical IoT solution for smart buildings contains three main parts:

• The IoT edge is where sensors and devices communicate real-time data to a network. This is where the data is sampled and collected from.
  
  
• The IoT platform is where the IoT-services are managed from. These services include device monitoring and time-series data storage, decision automation, business logic and analytics on data.
  
  
• The business domain represents the business applications and related processes you want to enrich with IoT data to accomplish business objectives.

The benefits of an IoT-enabled IWMS Platform

Unlocking new business value from the Internet of Things goes beyond connecting devices. It’s about gaining new data-driven insights that drive actions from IoT data, which enables your business to deliver innovative services and make quicker, more informed decisions.
However, as organizations begin to launch new IoT initiatives and deploy more and more IoT sensors, important questions may arise: How do you manage all these new initiatives? And how do you gain and maintain control over what is going on in your buildings? What do you do when your scope expands?

This is where a platform approach to managing all IoT initiatives can be extremely helpful. Choosing a platform can be advantageous, especially when you go beyond the level of point solutions and have a need for simplified management across buildings and integrated insights at a business level.
The Planon Platform is fully IoT enabled and will support you in aggregating and analyzing the massive amount of IoT data captured across all IoT initiatives and automate business responses to events.

The ability to connect all your IoT together and view on a single dashboard opens the door to new opportunities for data-driven insights around optimizing your building operations, driving better workplace experiences, and providing you with the tools and reports you need to prove you are in control.

Evaluate and select IoT solutions that meet your needs

The journey to effectively utilizing IoT is different for every organization. When beginning your IoT project, it’s important to define and focus on the information you want to optimize and the business goals that need to be achieved, instead of just implementing the technology for technology’s sake. Because organizations can start utilizing IoT from very different perspectives, the following principles are important in selecting Internet of Things solutions:

• Simplicity: The process of connecting sensors, creating rule automation, and maintaining control of all IoT must be simple and manageable.
  
  
• Scalability: It may be valuable that you can scale at own pace, and it is important that new data streams do not lead to performance drops for the users of the IWMS system or the general IT network, despite thousands of new sensors operating in real time.
  
  
• Security: A thousand sensors can potentially lead to a thousand security issues. By choosing the right network and sensors, you can reduce these risks.
  
  
• Single pane of glass: integrated solutions with automated business controls enable you to gain value from IoT at business domain level versus point solutions that may have strong capabilities for a specific business domain.
  
  
• System agnostic: There is great diversity in the type of technology and solutions around the portfolio of buildings. Think of elevators, escalators, HVACs, building management systems, smart bins, smart desks and so on.