Flex83 Cuts IIoT Solution Development Time to 6 Months

Longer IIoT solution development cycles—the long lost plight of Industrial OEMs and enterprises, unanswered or partially answered, and still discussed in every conversation. Gone are the days when prolonged development cycle was the norm, exhausting resources and capturing market opportunities. Today, OEMs know they need to capitalize on their assets. Faster time to market is not just an advantage; it’s the deciding factor of who becomes the leader in the evolving manufacturing sector. The other deciding factor is rapid solution development without compromising the cost of development. At the end of the day, every month added to the development cycle pulls them back from achieving the business transformation journey.

Why Time to Market is the Real Hype

Today, more than ever, it is crucial for OEMs to understand the complexities involved in developing and getting the products to market.  

In a recent survey with 100 senior executives and department leaders from major OEMs, IoT Analytics concluded they take an average of 18.5 months to bring an enterprise-grade IIoT solution to market. In some cases, moving from a proof of concept, with business case development, and stakeholder alignments, it took around 41 months to reach the first paying customer.  

While there is a huge potential in the technological advancements and IoT revolutionizing the OEM industry, we can’t defy the fact that IIoT solution development is complex, time-taking, and cost-heavy. Compared to traditional product development, due to its inherent complexity involving integrating multiple hardware components, software systems, security, network and connectivity and regulatory compliance, that too while ensuring seamless data collection and analysis as well as multiple testing phases leads to lengthy development cycles. And while all this is done, what’s compromised is Time to Market.

Factors Contributing to Greater Time to market

• Project complexity: Your IIoT project is taking longer to develop and reach the market because these applications are complex for each use-case. Few years back, industrial OEMs were measuring smaller chunk of data from different data points, in a smaller fraction of time without even knowing what is happening with their equipment. The dysconnectivity between their equipment was considered normal. But that’s the story we don’t look forward to today. Today, they are monitoring data from thousands of data points every second or even millisecond. And on top of that, there’s a need for more layers of applications, generating newer data sets to keep every equipment in check. The goal is to have a check on millions of assets and to capitalise the data. More the complexity, more extended will be the development cycle and as a result, they would need larger project teams to ensure zero risk of failure.
• Compliance constraints: With security, privacy, and transparency being prioritised, manufacturers are enforced to spend more time, resource, and money into the compliance. Manufacturers need to update their products and practices, have rigorous security measures, implement risk management practices as well as perform regular audits and adhere to the country regulations.
• Data security measures: Data security is a top priority for businesses. IoT applications must prioritize the protection of data they collect and transmit and this is another hurdle that makes the development process delayed. Ensuring effective security measures, including encryption, and authentication protocols require time and investment. While the necessary level of security for IIoT applications vary depending upon the breach potential, it is eminent to ensure your data remains safe, no matter how complex the system.

• Advanced use cases: Complex and advanced IoT use cases require in-depth research as well as extended development cycles. From basic dashboards to simple functionalities, businesses are now moving towards custom application requirements. From not having a data-backed visibility over the customer experiences on equipment usage to now shifting towards analytics-driven customer service excellence, industrial OEMs have a different purview of building applications from what they had years back. With innovation and differentiated use cases, having longer development cycles is evident.

Developing IIoT Solutions: More Challenging Than You Know

For years and years, one thing has been constant: Developing IIoT solutions takes more than you what think. And to be honest, IIoT solutions comes with their own set of complexities which bestow development constraints.  

Previously businesses looking to develop their own custom IIoT solutions had three options: Leverage IoTaaS, build from scratch or in combination with IoTaaS or open-source components, or use Low-Code application creation platforms. But for many reasons, which we examine in detail below, OEM leadership, as well as their engineering teams have become frustrated with the limitations of these solutions. This all emphasizes that industrial OEMs need a better set of answers from the IIoT ecosystem.

• The Misconception of IoTaaS: IoTaaS platforms provide a collection of individual services – not an IIoT platform that is ready for OEMs to use. As a result, when choosing the IoTaaS alternative, OEMs must invest heavily in the skills and resources required to first understand, and then integrate these services into a fully functional, enterprise-grade platform. This includes construction of a robust architecture from these IoTaaS components that addresses crucial aspects such as cybersecurity, identity management, device connectivity, data transformation, storage, analytics, user interfaces, scalability, and disaster recovery – all working as a coherent, scalable, and reliable system. For all but the smallest programs, this results in a major financial investment, very long time-to-market, and significant overall program risk. And then, even after the construction of the Platform, a substantial amount of work remains to build the actual Application(s). Further, once both the Platform and Applications are complete, a large stable of specialty skills must be permanently available to handle change management and enhancements as the market evolves. As a result of all of this, building enterprise-grade custom IIoT solutions using this approach is only practical for organizations with a very large investment appetite, and where the level of long-term specialization of the final platform warrants this high investment.  
  Pros: Virtually anything can be built using IoTaaS components.  
  Cons: Requires extensive specialty skills and cost, with long time-to-market.
• The Constraints of Low-Code IoT Platforms: While Low-Code/RAD tools do accelerate the initial development of simple applications, they are inherently limited by their pre-defined features and functionalities. OEMs often find these tools insufficient for achieving the necessary scale, reliability, security, or product differentiation required by demanding customers, leading to rework and wasted investment. And too often the OEM only realizes the drawbacks of these systems after significant investment of time and money.
  Pros: Less complex and you can build applications at less cost compared to other methods.
  Cons: Scalability restraints, limited customization, and limitations with IP ownership.
• The Challenges of "Home-Grown" Platforms: Building a "Home-Grown" platform, often accomplished by combining IoTaaS components with in-house specialty development, is another path taken by many OEMS to deliver higher levels of differentiation for their market needs. While this can be a good option provided sufficient expertise, capital, and time, the complexities and costs of building, maintaining, and evolving a full-fledged platform—including security, scalability, and ongoing updates—often lead to budget overruns, delays, and a compromised solution.
  Pros: You own the IP, scale as per your business needs, and future-proof your solutions for tech advancements.
  Cons: Cost-heavy, increased TTM, and TCO.

After considering these options, OEMs and enterprises came to a conclusion: The development bottlenecks just never end!  

Here are the development challenges faced while building IIoT solutions:

• Security and privacy: Security and privacy are the critically considered elements while developing IIoT solutions. On an average, every month around 5200 IoT devices are attacked with 7 million data records compromised daily. You wouldn't believe but this results into a damage of $330,000. Every connected device within an IoT network could be vulnerable which could further lead to larger breaches. While developing your IIoT solution, it is important to implement strong encryption (encryption protocols to secure data transmission between devices and the cloud), enable secure authentication, and ensure your IoT devices quickly address vulnerabilities by enabling auto updates.
• Scalability: IIoT application solution success isn’t defined if it does not meet the scalability standards. As your IoT ecosystem grows exponentially from thousands to millions, you have to ensure your application can handle the increasing number of connected devices without any failure. With more assets, abundant amount of generated data, network congestion, and increased infrastructure, your solution should be ready to scale efficiently with the growing needs of your customers.  
• Interoperability: While you build your IIoT solution, you should be aware of the possible challenges in the smooth functioning of different assets, platform, and applications in communicating and working together. As per McKinsey, up to 40% of IoT value is lost because of the interoperability challenges. The major reasons are proprietary systems and lack of universal communication protocols. Moreover, different data formats could hinder the standardization of data across devices which further impacts real-time decisions. Application enablement platforms that use MQTT helps in resolving the compatibility issues within multiple devices and systems. The API integrations help in easing communication and sharing data between different systems as well as solves the integration and interaction challenges.
• Data management: Data is the food that IIoT solutions feed on. Storing enormous amount of data generated by IoT devices, real-time processing, enhancing data quality, and data privacy should come in handy while you build your own solution. Therefore, having an effective data management strategy is a must. With the right platform, you can implement data lifecycle management to reduce storage cost and ensure you only work on the valuable data. In order to authorize specific users to sensitive data and to maintain data integrity, you must have clear data policies.  
• User experience (UX) and usability: User experience is another important aspect to be focused on while developing IIoT solutions. As a user, your first thought while accessing any application is: Is it easy to access? That’s exactly what you need to create; an application that’s easy to use. Building an application that involves browsing multiple assets through a single interface, is simple, accessible, and customizable should be the goal. Simplify your user interface, prioritize accessibility, make it device friendly, and create a unified user experience.
• ‍Lack of IoT app development skills: Developing IoT applications is complex, time-taking and a job only the tech stalwarts can promise. One of the major challenges is the lack of skilled professionals who could build the application that you want, with the technical capabilities and the finest user experience. You can upskill your team by educating them about embedded systems, cloud computing, network protocols, etc or if you do not have an in-house team, you have the option to partner with an organisation that can help you build the right IIoT solution.

IIoT Solution Development: The Winsome Way

Despite multiple development complexities in building IIoT solutions, there is still a way out of the ever-challenging heap. Using a platform like Flex83 that has easy-to-use APIs, device integration capabilities and built-in security features, you can develop and deploy IIoT solutions seamlessly.

Moving the Development Needle Faster with Flex83 as Catalyst

Faster development is something every OEM and enterprise is aiming for. The Flex Core Services (comprised set of pre-built 30+ and growing middleware microservices through secure APIs) ranging from device, database, and 3rd-party secure Connectors to ETL Transformation, Analytics, Identity Access Management (IAM), Notifications, Scheduling, AI/ML Model Building, and much more provides direct developer access to the entire set of Core Services via secure APIs accessed through well documented SDK code. With the combined power of the SDKs and the Core Services (middleware), developers can produce a small fraction of the overall product lines of code that new applications are ultimately composed of, developing custom, enterprise-grade applications and solutions quickly and efficiently.  

Decomplexifying the development process further, the Flex83 Hardened Application Catalyst Code can be used as is as a complete IIoT solution as the application is fully validated for scale and provides multiple common IIoT functions from device connectivity to data transformation and storage, analytics, notifications, IAM functions, AI/ML modeling, and much more. However, because most industrial OEMs and Enterprises will want to build custom solutions to build competitive differentiation of custom context for their applications, this application is more commonly used as “Catalyst Code”. Building custom applications from this source further streamlines custom application development. Given the completeness of the Catalyst Code application, developers can easily re-factor this rich application into the custom application that exactly meets their needs. And further, because the Flex83 Hardened Application Catalyst Code is built based on best practices to integrate the Flex Core Services and associated SDKs, developers can quickly recognize how to leverage and transform existing code blocks for further customization.  

The Flex Suite provides the Flex Data and Analytics Studio as a vehicle to easily and securely connect to internal or external data, transform and store that data, perform analytics and build derived data, and then to use the drag and drop Dashboard Studio and data query features to build custom dashboards and shareable applications for selected users. Using the pro-code features in the Dashboard and Analytics Studio, “citizen developers” as well as data scientists can build powerful solutions with no code changes to the Flex Platform. The Flex Dashboard and Analytics Studio provides a complete workflow to securely connect to streaming or at rest data, modify or transform it, analyse it, implement AL/ML operations, create dynamic dashboards and more.  

Summing it all, the Flex83 layers of value simplifies and accelerated the development of enterprise-grade applications.

Platform Case Study: Scaling IoT Application Creation with Flex83

From Few Devices to 5 MILLION in 6 months: The image below reflects the actual development and deployment time for one of the largest service providers in the U.S., showcasing the real-world implementation of our Flex Platform and its impact on efficiency, speed, and scalability. It demonstrates the Platform's capability to handle complex projects while meeting the stringent demands of scalability, reliability, security and cost for very large-scale enterprises.

Progress Over Promises

With a constant wave of technological interruptions overturning multiple industries, the manufacturing sector is no different. It’s time industrial OEMs move from the traditional sales to moving the needle in the direction of progress. This make-shift is only possible when they know how to quickly develop and deploy customised and scalable IIoT application quickly, without fail. Onboarding an Application Enablement Platfrom could be the quickest enabler to what they say: Bridging the gaps between the Manufacturers and their customers.  

In an era of relentless technological change, OEMs no longer have the luxury of multi-year IIoT rollouts. By adopting an Application Enablement Platform like Flex83, you can:

• Cut development time to 6 months.
• Increase overall solution scalability and security.
• Deliver richer, data-driven customer experiences with AI-driven Asset Management Solutions.

Ready to learn more? Contact us or Request a demo to see how Flex83 can transform your IIoT-driven Business Transformation strategy and help you deliver cutting-edge solutions, faster.