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Digital Platform Aims To Simplify IoT Access

Blue Pillar, a manufacturer of Internet of Things (IoT) network solutions provider for IoT data and control systems, has announced its new Deploy-It-Yourself Management Platform (DIYMP) to advance the company’s mission of simplifying access to IoT-enabled data and control capabilities from commercial and industrial (C&I) systems, sensors, and equipment. The DIYMP offering gives software development, energy service, maintenance service and value-add application providers an easy-to-use, highly flexible platform to help automate the process of designing, quoting, installing, configuring and remotely managing IoT networks that support their strategic data and control requirements. Initially, the platform will leverage Blue Pillar’s unprecedented flexibility in connecting any energy related systems and equipment such as Distributed Energy Resources (DER), meters (water, gas and electric), generators (diesel and gas), energy storage, solar panels, boilers, HVAC control panels, combined heat and power (CHP) systems, Building Automation Systems, and fuel cells. Over time, the platform will expand with connectivity to non-energy sensors and systems.

“In 2017, we launched our award-winning NAAS (Network-as-a-Service) solution which provided a turnkey IoT connectivity service to customers who lacked the ability to deploy, maintain, and manage C&I based IoT networks,” said Tom Willie, CEO of Blue Pillar. “While many customers have benefitted from our NAAS offering, we have been inundated with solution providers who have robust internal organizations with operational capabilities but limited IoT experience. These customers were approaching every project like a system integrator, where each customer installation was a custom and cumbersome engineering effort burdened with high costs and long deployment times for each project. Our DIYMP solution has been specifically designed with these customers in mind, leveraging the deployment automation software capabilities that Blue Pillar has utilized in our deployments of thousands of IoT networks worldwide.”

The new (DIYMP) offering is a seamless, turnkey end-to-end SAAS platform built from Blue Pillar’s decade of experience in utilizing software to automate the manual related engineering processes that cripple IoT network deployments from a cost and time-to-completion perspective. The platform was designed to enable operations organizations with a core “ERP” for their operational design, deployment, quoting, and ongoing management processes related to IoT data and control networks to support their businesses efforts. The DIYMP solution consists of the following capabilities:

Gateway-based embedded software including:

• Blue Pillar Operating System (BPOS) – An IoT run-time operating system specifically designed to be loaded on 3rd party IoT gateways. BPOS provides for IoT connectivity via numerous local protocols, edge-based programmable control platform utilizing Node-Red, local threshold detection, and seamless end-to-end coordination with Blue Pillar’s DIYMP cloud-based remote management and data historian solutions while also supporting data and control delivery to customer cloud and 3rd party applications. 

Cloud-based IoT operations management solutions including:

• DesignIOT – A tablet accessible solution for sales engineering or operations users designed to simplify site surveys, hardware retrofit prescriptions, network design, and network costing. DesignIOT automates the process of determining where and what to install to retrofit a customer site to gain access to IoT data or control capabilities utilizing a library of auto-prescribed, pre-curated hardware retrofit kits and design rules. In addition, DesignIOT will auto-create bills of materials for quoting purposes and auto-generate work order and installation drawings required by electrical contractors for network installation. 
• DeployIOT – A tablet or phone accessible solution designed to be utilized by electrical contractors to coordinate, track, manage, and simplify the IoT network installation and configuration process. DeployIOT manages on-site deployments with inventory usage control, install time-tracking, auto-detection and provisioning of installed IoT gateways, and end-to-end network testing and validation. 
• ManageIOT – A back office enterprise software platform designed to be utilized by a network operations center (NOC) for ongoing IoT network management, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and software revision control. 

Cloud-based IoT Data and Control Historian / Dispatch:

• UtilizeIOT – An optional data historian and central control platform which can be utilized by solution providers to store IoT information and dispatch control commands to edge-based access gateways. The UtilizeIOT solution supports a variety of data storage and data offloading options including cloud-to-cloud transfer of data to customer IT systems or 3rd party applications via an open API.

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