By Basant Singhatwadia, VP of IoT Product Strategy, Accruent
This is the second of seven articles in our blog series entitled ‘Essentials of an IoT Remote Monitoring Platform.’ This week we will discuss the importance of controller hardware agnostic IoT platforms.
Many remote monitoring platforms, particularly those that come from a hardware provider (Emerson, Danfoss, etc.), tend to be category specific. This means your business can only monitor one provider’s hardware, and you are automatically limited to the categories of equipment that manufacturer can monitor. For example, you could have a remote monitoring platform built for refrigeration and HVAC devices. It’s great to monitor those two categories, but it may not be enough if you ever want to monitor lighting, elevators and energy.
There are two major drawbacks when implementing point solutions:
- Your enterprise would only be able to use one provider’s hardware, potentially causing higher costs due to lack of competition for hardware procurement.
- Two to three years post implementation, if you decide to monitor new equipment categories outside of that provider’s scope, your business would have to implement a disparate system to track these new categories. This would likely add additional recurring costs and additional difficulty when trying to report across platforms.
When choosing a remote monitoring platform, it should be architected to be controller hardware agnostic and support different device types. Your business today has a range of hardware already, especially if you have multiple categories of equipment. An IoT platform should be able to communicate to all of them with just few hardware upgrades.
There are several benefits to having a controller agnostic solution:
- Seamless cross-device communication ensuring a single point of reference for reporting.
- You could accommodate additional device types without additional costs or setup fees.
By having a system that can communicate with multiple categories of equipment, you avoid leaving value on the table, or worse, going through costly control replacements. By having a system that communicates with everything in your enterprise you can expand when you choose to remote monitor additional equipment categories for additional operational savings.
In the next article, we will discuss how to cut alarm noise and focus on the real issues.
If you are interested in further information on our IoT Remote Monitoring solution, click here.
Explore the rest of the “Essentials of an IoT Remote Monitoring Platform” series:
1. Introduction
2. The Importance of Hardware Agnostic IoT platforms
3. Cutting Out Alarm Noise to Focus on Real Issues
4. Creating a System Between Your People and Your Remote Monitoring Platform
5. Creating a Closed Loop Maintenance System for Your Business
6. Stop Reacting: Use Data to Get Ahead of Equipment Failure
7. Gaining Enterprise Control of Your Setpoints For Next-Level Savings
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