Sense Tecnic has recently partnered with Australia’s biggest Telecom provider, to explore the use of Node-RED as part of their advanced IoT platform. Leveraging FRED, our cloud based Node-RED service, they are exploring how Node-RED can act as an integration point for IoT devices and a set of diverse IoT platforms and other micro-services. According to Patrick Robles, IoT architect “FRED provides a perfect tool to allow us to architect a flexible IoT framework that supports the needs of our customers who use a diverse set of IoT platforms and services.”

Multi-IoT Service platform (MISP)

This approach, using FRED as a broker and front end for a number of IoT platforms and services represents an innovative approach to meeting customer needs. Increasingly, Telcos worldwide are recognizing that their customer base are using a wide variety of IoT platforms and services, ranging from simple time series databases through to Microsoft Azure or Cisco’s full blown IoT platform. Rather than attempting to compete with these offerings, Telcos are recognizing that their best approach is to meet their customer needs and support a single front end, that dispatches data from incoming devices to the appropriate IoT platform that is managing that device. In essence, this Multi-IoT service platform (MISP) approach recognizes the fragmented nature of the IoT space and the fact that no single platform dominates.

Fig 1. Using FRED to enable a Multi-IoT service platform

This approach offers significant flexibility. FRED can be used as a full service IoT platform, allowing rapid development of IoT apps using the built in Node-RED visual programming tool backed by simple integrated services such as InfluxDB etc. Alternatively, FRED can act as a simple broker, accepting incoming data from real world IoT devices and machines, doing some basic data clean-up and formatting, and dispatching the data to the appropriate IoT platform which manages that IoT device. Or, a hybrid solution can be adopted allowing FRED to augment existing IoT platforms with some processing, alerting and dashboarding happening in FRED and other services, e.g. data archiving, device management and analytics happening in the customers preferred IoT platform.

Whichever approach is adopted, the end customer is happy because FRED offers the flexibility needed to integrate a range of existing IoT platforms in a Multi-IoT Service Platform (MISP).

Contact us for more information.

info@sensetecnic.com