bluemetal wp iot for real-time business

1 Insight proprietary and confidential. Do not copy or distribute. © 2016 Insight Direct, USA. All rights reserved. 1.800.359.0322 • bluemetal.com

Businesses today are going through a digital transformation. They are evolving from relying only on historical data to leveraging both historical and real-time data to drive innovation, strategy and day-to-day business decisions. In addition, they are looking to engage their customers and partners through Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that provide immersive digital experiences 24/7 and that work on any device.

Companies that manufacture products used in industries like manufacturing, retail, mining, energy, health and life sciences, food and beverages, and Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) are experiencing constant forces that are disrupting their product, service or business model. This is driving these companies to re-evaluate the businesses they are in, their business models and how they deliver differentiation and innovation in their operating models.

But what is driving this disruption and these forces? At the heart of this change are two main drivers: changing customer expectations and digitizing business processes. These companies have customers in industries that are highly competitive, and many are facing headwinds in their own businesses. Therefore, they are constantly looking to improve operational efficiencies, do more with less and cut costs smartly. Basic customer expectations now include real-time engagement, personalized products and services, omnichannel service experience, value transparency, real-time data visibility and proactive support.

The impact to business models has been even greater, with once capex-only business models evolving to include opex business model options as efficiencies in operating models are crucial to increased profitability.

Real-Time BusinessDigital Transformation Through Information

ContentsReal-Time Business………………………………………………………………. 2

Real-Time Business platform……………………………………………………. 4

Customer stories……………………………………………………………......... 11

Summary……………………………………………………………..................... 13

About the authors………………………………………………………………... 13

Insight proprietary and confidential. Do not copy or distribute. © 2016 Insight Direct, USA. All rights reserved. 1.800.359.0322 • BlueMetal.com2

Real-Time BusinessWe call a business embarking on this transformation journey a Real-Time Business. Digital transformation has to be led by information, where modern data architecture, advanced analytics, smart devices and lean engineering are leveraged to create the next generation of customer-, partner- and employee-facing solutions.

What does a successful transformation look like? For companies embarking on the Real-Time Business transformation journey, success is measured in four ways:

• Increased customer satisfaction — Are customers satisfied with your product, your services and the perceived value from being your customer? • Increased product quality — Do you have information on where your products are, how they are being used and which components are likely to fail in the near future? • Higher profitability and cost savings — Are your products “right-sized” for your customer versus one size fits all? Are your service operations efficient enough to reduce the cost of service operations and truck rolls? • Net new revenue business opportunities — Have you been able to identify adjacent opportunities that drive net new revenue for the business?

The metrics of a successful transformation to a Real-Time Business can be achieved by focusing on four specific outcomes that are built on top of a Real-Time Business platform:

• Data visibility • Product quality • Operational efficiency • Product as a Service

Insight proprietary and confidential. Do not copy or distribute. © 2016 Insight Direct, USA. All rights reserved.2 1.800.359.0322 • bluemetal.com


Data visibility For most companies, it takes a lot of effort to provide basic data visibility to customers. Data about the state, use, location, inventory and health of products, as well as the details of services delivered, are now essential to improve customer satisfaction and to continually highlight the value customers receive. Investing in a modern data architecture that brings together real-time information about the use of products in the customer site, the products’ locations, when it was serviced, what services were executed, issue resolution and fundamental information, such as inventory and orders, is required to deliver on this outcome. With this foundation, further operationalizing of this data can be attained by using machine-learning algorithms for predicting issues before they arise but also for cross-selling and upselling based on product usage insight. Additionally, building modern digital experiences that leverage this data as a basic foundation is imperative in delivering the transparency customers expect today. But, as digital experiences deliver data visibility to customers, they should do the same for internal organizations that include primarily field and support operations. Customers expect an omnichannel experience in which they can choose to engage via web or expect the same level of insight when they call in to a support center. Product quality One important outcome of the Real-Time Business transformation is the ability to customize products to specific customer needs. Rather than building products a customer may not use fully, thereby increasing the cost of the product, access to product usage data allows product engineering teams to tweak various factors and build a more personalized and tailored product. Compared to building products based on generic industry standards, customizing those standards to specific customer needs allows delivery of higher-fidelity products. Operational efficiency One area most companies are constantly trying to improve is how they deliver service to their customers. This includes optimizing field and support operations. When it comes to field service optimization, key considerations are given to improving the number of customers seen by a field technician in a day, reducing truck rolls, being prescriptive with actions needed by field personnel and delivering a higher level of intelligence to support personnel during a support call. The ability to harness data, predict customer experience, optimize field scheduling and even point field personnel to the exact location of the product or equipment in question are easy use cases for investing in a Real-Time Business platform. Product as a Service Tier-based maintenance programs can be introduced where the maintenance of the products can range from “owned by the customer” to “owned by the company.” The value for the customer is greater when predictive notifications and alerts are available and failure rates and downtime are much lower than if the customer managed the maintenance itself. You can evolve your business to provide your product as a service based on a recurring revenue model.



In order to deliver low-risk maintenance value propositions, advancing the use of real-time data from sensors and devices that help predict and even autonomously act to prevent downtime becomes critical. The Real-Time Business platform allows the company to deliver the continuum of service offerings, thereby increasing revenue opportunities while driving down cost-of-service operations. Another advantage of transformation using the Real-Time Business platform is the potential for monetizing data collected to deliver newer services that were just not possible before. An example of adjacent new services could include providing consulting to customers based on real-time insights gathered on how products and equipment are used.

Real-Time Business platform

Transforming to a Real-Time Business requires an investment in people, processes and tools. In order to meet the expectations of your customers and provide a platform for driving business impact at velocity, a new approach is required in the design, development and deployment of your software products. Real-Time Business solutions are SaaS applications that support frequent release cycles, work on any device and provide a multitenant authentication scheme that delivers secure access to the underlying information for customers, partners and employees.

In addition, a Real-Time Business implies you are adopting the latest sensor, beacon and smart device technologies for connecting products, physical environments and people to generate real-time data. Let’s examine the Internet of Things, big data and the capabilities you need in order to achieve a Real-Time Business. Internet of Things (IoT) The IoT is not new. The ability to connect devices to networks, gather telemetry and display that information to garner insight and take action has been around for some time. NASA pioneered the concept of data being collected by sensors and sent across space and time to be analyzed in near-real time so that status could be visualized, insights gleaned and action taken in case of emergency.



NASA’s mission control consisted of hundreds of people, each with their own collection of monitors, providing data visualization of key metrics coming from the command module or an astronaut’s suit. That data was an immediate measure of mission status and safety. Truly amazing when you think about what that organization accomplished given the state of technology at the time.

The one thing NASA had that made it unique was a budget. A huge budget. Billions of dollars enabled NASA to put humans on the moon and, in the process, define the IoT for the rest of us. It appears the IoT really is rocket science. It is no longer necessary to break the bank to IoT-enable your products and connect them to the cloud to gather telemetry, transform and store data and gather insight to act upon. Sensors and miniature computers are inexpensive and getting cheaper and more powerful all the time. The ability to develop the code to gather sensor readings, connect to a secure cloud endpoint and send messages has never been easier. Cloud platforms such as Microsoft® Azure® provide a set of managed services for telemetry ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics and data visualization that allow you to bring an end-to-end solution to market at velocity and realize business impact immediately. What is driving this thirst for the IoT is that once you sensor-enable your products, you gain access to more data than ever before. This data will tell you about the quality of your products and how they are used by your customers, calculate mean time to failure for their components and provide immediate business value through automatically scheduled preventive maintenance. Using predictive and prescriptive analytics, you can offer an enhanced customer experience, increase product quality and create a competitive advantage.

Big data It is easy to focus on the devices in our IoT scenarios as they usually represent the wow factor in the use case. What you learn very quickly with IoT is that once you have sensor-enabled your devices, it becomes all about the data. Big data. There are approximately 2 billion PCs on the planet today1 and about 8 billion mobile devices.2 By 2020, it is projected there will be 200 billion connected devices driving exabytes of data into the cloud.3

Insight proprietary and confidential. Do not copy or distribute. © 2016 Insight Direct, USA. All rights reserved.5

Mission control — image courtesy of NASA

1.800.359.0322 • bluemetal.com


We need to learn new skills and leverage new cloud capabilities in order to deal with this massive amount of data. How will we ingest, transform, store and analyze this data and, even more importantly, query and visualize the data so we can quickly draw insights and take action?

Real-Time Business reference architecture In order to realize the benefits of an IoT solution, you need a set of capabilities that define the process for how you get from device events to meaningful data to analytics and then on through to gathering insight and taking action. By working closely with our clients over the past few years, BlueMetal has developed a reference architecture that identifies the core capabilities required for a complete end-to-end IoT and advanced analytics SaaS solution.


Big data growth — image courtesy of Microsoft

Real-Time Business reference architecture



Sensors, devices and edge gateways Each IoT scenario requires analysis and strategy on how best to sensor-enable the product, the environment or people to efficiently and securely gather the data needed to drive the business case. This may involve Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags for location and product Stock-Keeping Unit (SKU); environmental sensors such as temperature, humidity and radioactivity; mechanical sensors for tracking gear revolutions or hydraulic pump iterations; or, in the case of people, biometric sensors for heart rate, skin temperature or blood glucose. In addition to the sensors, you will need devices and/or edge gateways with an embedded operating system such as Linux® or Windows® 10 IoT to host the code that manages the connectivity to sensors and the physical environments in which it is deployed, secure network connectivity via wired, wireless and/or cellular, secure authentication to the cloud gateway, device-to-cloud messaging including heartbeat and telemetry, and cloud-to-device messaging for command and control. Advanced scenarios may add analytics, filtering, business rules and alerts, and notification at the edge. The smart device and/or edge gateways will also participate in the device management protocols you employ for managing device state, firmware upgrades and other remote control operations. Cloud gateways and device management A cloud gateway is a cloud-hosted service that delivers secure device connectivity, telemetry ingestion, and remote command and control. This service should provide these capabilities at scale so that as the number of your connected devices grows, the service never fails your business. This service should include a transient store for all incoming messages so the real-time analytics service can operate on the messages. Device management is typically incorporated into the cloud gateway service. Device management provides the ability to register devices using their unique identifier such as serial number. Once registered, the device will be able to connect securely to the cloud gateway for communication purposes. Device management may leverage the concept of a device twin, which is a digital representation of the state of the device that is kept synchronized with connected devices. The device twin provides device properties such as battery level and firmware revision. Real-time analytics Real-time analytics is a cloud-hosted service that allows you to query across the incoming messages in real time, select messages of a certain type or that contain certain values, apply aggregation and calculations over time (called windowing), transform the messages, identify alarm conditions and then act on the results of the analytics. In most cases, this service routes the resulting message either unchanged or as a message that is the result of the analytics to a storage location, API or message queue for further processing.



Data management, storage and messaging The IoT is all about the data. In order to get the most out of the real-time data now coursing through your cloud, you will want to be able to provide various types of storage, each optimized for the next step in the data pipeline. • To archive messages, you may use long-term (cold) storage. • To provide integration with event-driven microservices or on-premise line-of-business systems, you may route messages to a store and forward message queue. • To provide time-based query capabilities and integration with traditional applications and modern dashboards, you may leverage relational or NoSQL storage services. • For integration with advanced analytics engines, such as Hadoop® or predictive analytics, you may opt to leverage a data lake, a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). • You may look to use an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) service to perform data integration and transformation operations. Advanced analytics Advanced analytics is a catchphrase for all possible big data analytics you may look to perform on your real-time data. This may involve combining the real-time data with historical and reference data and leveraging the distributed query capabilities of a Hadoop engine, using ETL tools to integrate into a data warehouse or employing a trained predictive model to automate preventive maintenance. It is also possible to exploit the latest advances in cognitive APIs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots along with this real-time data to create new immersive experiences for your customers. Microservices and API gateways A microservice provides a business or platform capability through a well-defined API, data contract and configuration. It provides only this function. It represents business capabilities defined using domain-driven design, implemented using object-oriented best practices, tested at each step in the deployment pipeline and deployed through automation as autonomous, isolated, highly scalable, resilient services in a distributed cloud infrastructure. An IoT solution will have three types of microservices: • Transactional — are found as part of the real-time analytic service and are responsible for writing messages to the appropriate store. • Event-driven — listen on message queues and act on the event of a message arriving on the queue. These microservices are typically used to drive alert and notification business processes or integration with other line-of-business systems that require special message handling. • API contracts — leverage REST-defined endpoints and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data models and provide the crosscutting concerns and business capabilities you want exposed to any consuming application.



API gateways provide secure API proxies for your REST APIs; organize APIs into products; restrict access to API products via defined developer groups; offer a subscription capability; inject policy for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), throttling, quotas, etc.; and supply analytics at the product, API and operation levels. API gateways enable the segregation of your APIs to provide semiprivate (partner access) or public access and then monetize the semiprivate and public APIs to create a new revenue channel. Visualization, alerts and notifications Once you can ingest, analyze and store your real-time data, you will want to create customer-, partner- and employee-facing applications that deliver impactful data illustrations, visual- and device-centric alerts and notifications using your APIs, and event-driven microservices. In addition, you may look to leverage cloud-hosted mobile notification services for real-time updates on mobile devices and cognitive APIs and AI bots to create compelling and immersive modern experiences. Identity The identify service provides a single sign-on and/or a multitenant authentication and authorization mechanism such that the person logging in to your application only sees the data he or she is allowed to see and the application functionality his or her role provides. The identity service will provide these features in both a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) model, as well as integrate with your company’s directory services. Automation Designing, developing, deploying and operationalizing an IoT solution requires the adoption of an automated approach to the software product lifecycle. The popular term for this today is DevOps. DevOps implies you are organized into a software product team model that places an emphasis on product quality as the code moves through an automated deployment pipeline. The team has a well-defined process and uses a set of tools to automate its work, reducing errors and improving quality. The team leverages the cloud platform to automate the provisioning of cloud infrastructure, build, test and release management, deployment to the cloud, and the monitoring and gathering of run-time health metrics. Security The IoT has two primary security zones: on premises and the cloud. The on-premise environment is the primary attach surface as it is most exposed. Here are a few things to ensure with respect to security in your on-premise and cloud environments: • Secure the wired/wireless network your devices are running on. • The embedded operating systems running your devices are up-to-date and remotely patchable through an automated firmware upgrade process. • Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to secure the connection from the smart device and/or edge gateway to the cloud. • Encrypt messages at rest and in flight. • Your public cloud endpoints are secured using SSL, and you are using some form of authentication and authorization such as Basic, OAuth, managed certificates or shared access policies. • Leverage an identify service for access to your applications. • Leverage a key management service to provide governance and limited secure access to your certificates.



Microsoft Azure IoT and Cortana Analytics Microsoft provides a feature-rich and complete IoT and advanced analytics platform on which you can build your real-time business.

Capability Azure Service(s)

Edge Gateway Azure IoT Gateway SDK

Cloud Gateway & Device Management Azure IoT Hub

Real-Time Analytics Azure Stream Analytics

Data Management, Storage & Messaging SQL Database, DocumentDB, Service Bus, Blob Storage, Data Factory, Data Lake and more…

Advanced Analytics HDInsight, Machine Learning, SQL Data Warehouse, Spark and more…

Microservices & API Gateway API Apps, Web Jobs, Service Fabric, API Management and more…

Visualization, Alerts & Notifications Web Sites, Xamarin, PowerBI, Notification Hub and more…

Identity Azure AD

Automation Azure PowerShell & App Insights

Security Key Vault

For each of the capabilities in the reference architecture, one or more Azure services will provide that function through a scalable, configurable finished service. The key is knowing how to bring them all together using a combination of code, configuration and best practices.


Microsoft Azure IoT and Cortana Analytics platform



Customer storiesBlueMetal has been designing, developing, deploying and operationalizing IoT solutions based on the Microsoft Azure platform for several years now and in 2016 was awarded the Microsoft Global IoT Partner of the Year. Following are a few examples of Real-Time Business SaaS solutions designed and developed by BlueMetal. Weka Solutions Vaccine Smart-Fridge The Vaccine Smart-Fridge uses an edge device to collect real-time data from numerous sensors on every unit to enable 24/7 monitoring and analysis. BlueMetal worked with Weka to develop the IoT-enabled device that keeps vaccines fresh, secured and accounted for. The real-time visualization of vaccine inventory enables Weka to understand the vaccination rates at every location. By leveraging Azure Machine Learning, clinics can be alerted to upcoming vaccine shortages at specific locations or in certain areas.


Weka Solutions device management dashboard

Weka Solutions device management dashboard



Analog Devices Smart Stadium The Analog Devices® Smart Stadium solution demonstrates how monitoring the biometrics of members of a team, combined with real-time analytics and predictive models based on past performance, can provide data visualizations for real-time, in-game decisions by coaches. This same model can be applied to any business that has a need to monitor employee health and safety, such as first responders, factory floor workers and the military.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway race fan mobile experience Race cars today are some of the most sensor-enabled objects on the planet. Pit crews have access to thousands of data points, which they leverage to optimize the vehicle and give them a competitive edge. BlueMetal worked with Indianapolis Motor Speedway to configure sensors around the racetrack to make this data available to fans through a responsive web and Xamarin® mobile application. This second screen experience provides not only the traditional leaderboard, but using real-time analytics and predictive modeling, the application provides details to race fans they never had before, such as who had the fastest lap and who is the up and coming “hot” driver as the race is going.


Analog Devices Smart Stadium employee health monitoring

Indianapolis Motor Speedway race fan mobile experience



SummaryBusinesses today rely heavily on historical data that, over time, becomes stale and unrepresentative of the fast-changing markets, customer sentiment, product quality and competition. In order to tackle these challenges, businesses are looking to cloud-hosted modern SaaS solutions to provide real-time data, advanced analytics and data visualization to drive real-time business decisions and processes. BlueMetal, an Insight company, is an interactive design and technology architecture consulting firm that solves the most challenging business and technical problems facing our clients. We leverage lean engineering, DevOps, microservice architecture and cloud platforms to deliver mission-critical and business-transformative SaaS solutions for our clients. About the authors

As the national practice director at BlueMetal Bob Familiar leads a team of seasoned principal architects who are responsible for technical pre-sales, industry research and development, rapid prototyping and outreach to the technology community. Raheel Retiwalla is a principal architect on the BlueMetal national practice He is a seasoned technology consultant who is passionate about building modern software products and services that are business-transformative and have a positive impact on human lives by using data, analytics, machine learning and the IoT.

1 Worldometers. (2016). Computers Sold in the World This Year. Worldometers.info. 2 Cisco. (2016, Feb. 1). Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2015-2020

White Paper. Cisco.com. 3 Intel. (2016). A Guide to the Internet of Things Infographic. Intel.com.


bluemetal wp iot for real-time business

Documents