This week we made a major announcement regarding our partnership with LoRa gateway and hardware manufacturer MultiTech to make Smart Monitoring an easy to deploy and customize bundle.  This announcement means more than just two companies have technology that can work together.  Over the last year ClearBlade and MultiTech have quietly dedicated their engineering teams to integrate their offerings so industries can rapidly deploy a smart monitoring LoRa based solution.  This solution is unique and superior to what the marketplace offers today, with out of the box deployment and ready-to-go sensors but also with a broad ability to customize and integrate into the enterprise.  

Industrial IoT Focus

ClearBlade and Multitech for years have worked in common industries.  Rail, Aerospace, Agriculture, Oil and Gas, Energy, and Smart Cities are a shared focus and both companies have domain expertise and depth of knowledge that allows for an understanding of the true problems these industries encounter.  Our combined experience in these industries gives us a deep understanding of challenges and the ability to communicate in the context of the problems each industry experiences day to day.    

Smart Monitoring of solutions

Smart Monitoring from ClearBlade and MultiTech allows for a unique set of capabilities that rapidly justifies ROI.  We are delivering the world’s most powerful out of the box edge solution by bundling sensors (acceleration, temperature, fill level, tilt, proximity, GPS, air quality, etc.) with industry leading gateways and the most complete edge computing platform.  This dream team partnership allows for many turn-key solutions for:

• Energy companies ensuring power poles are not tilting after a storm, 
• Oil and Gas companies validating holding tanks are full
• Farmers knowing when and where they should be watering their crops
• Mining companies tracking critical equipment and workers
• Railroads monitoring the health of cargo traveling on cars 

Zero Touch Deployment

So much effort is spent and avoidable risk is introduced when a truck is forced to roll out into a field to check on a meter.  Fuel is consumed, skilled workers are being paid overtime, issues require diagnosis, and operations temporarily brought offline lead to direct costs that can be avoided.  The liability associated with putting a worker in the field is another shadow expense that piles up at scale, whether it’s traffic accidents, or putting a worker in harm’s way –  as they do their best to service and keep operations running are all additional burdens put on the bottom line.  With zero touch deployment, ClearBlade and Multitech are reducing this burden, making it possible for gateways to be managed remotely, for sensors to be securely added without field workers following complicated engineering installation plans. Additionally, rules and logic can be easily applied and updated from the safety of back offices instead of field personnel physically tethered to production equipment.  This zero touch model will not only make the cost of doing business go down but also help ensure that companies are keeping their workers safe and more productive.

Edge Data Capability 

Edge Compute has certainly become all the rage the last several years but it has remained a complicated challenge for many who run operations.  The idea that we want to get information from sensors to build up our Edge Data competence is appealing.  The idea that we want to react to hot data at the edge to run logic, rules, and AI algorithms is compelling.  The idea to take our edge data and learn in an unsupervised way is also very appealing to an operational team.  Sadly the barrier to entry for Edge Data Capability remains high.  Many operational groups are still at the beginning simply hoping if they had device management they could solve real business problems.  

The ClearBlade/MultiTech Solution is an answer to this challenge.  The Smart Monitoring bundle enables operational users to customize their solution using their business terms and allows for rules to be written in the language of the person working in the field.  Instead of needing to deploy applications with confusing control panels, our Smart Monitoring bundle allows for deployment to happen automatically because the edge is available and is the best most resilient place to run this processing.  This hiding of complexity, and deployment simplicity is ideal for any organization that just needs things to work out of the box.

We are very excited about our partnership with MultiTech.  Having a proven partner who understands edge gateways, secure sensors, and simple configuration, paired with ClearBlade’s industry leading Smart Monitoring software out of the box, will make everyone’s lives easier and raise the bar for the next generation of edge computing solutions.