JULY 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9worker. The other benefit of having all of this data is compliance and reporting. The ability to automatically generate regulatory reports quickly and accurately was a major undertaking for many companies. So it was from this idea and vision that Industrial Scientific made the decision to charge ahead and build its cloud-based IoT platform, iNet, to enable and power its "Gas Detection-as-a-Service" business. iNet was officially launched in 2003. Fast forward to 2017, and Industrial Scientific's iNet platform is a mature and robust IoT SaaS solution that is on its 125th release with a customer base of approximately 3,000 customers across 9,000 global sites. A local on-premise version of the software is also available for customers who need an alternative to the SaaS solution. With over 225,000 connected gas detectors on the iNet platform, each month our service team receives 17,000 inbound alerts that are managed and triaged within our Salesforce.com CRM system. Many of these alerts result in new gas detectors and sensors being shipped to customers via integrations with our Oracle EBS ERP system. We've been very successful in creating a closed loop integrated "alert-to-fulfillment" process that ties together our fielded product IoT system (iNet), our CRM system, and our ERP system in a manner that allows us to scale and facilitate our "Gas Detection-as-a-Service" business. As we look to the future, we plan to expand our capabilities, services, and offerings to adjacent equipment categories and related business processes. We feel that we are uniquely positioned to leverage our platform more broadly and apply our expertise in delivering a highly successful "Gas Detection-as-a- Service" business to other equipment manufacturers and service providers who are contemplating all of the possibilities that smart equipment represents.From a technology perspective, the iNet solution is a custom developed web and mobile application that is implemented in a traditional technical architecture using a mix of virtual machines and dedicated server hardware with co-location hosting provided by a globally recognized top tier data center provider. However, given the rate of our growth projections, we will be looking to distribute various aspects of the solution to the cloud to gain economies of scale and elasticity in the areas of compute, memory, and storage. In examining Platform-as-a-Service providers such as GE Predix, Azure, and AWS, we've determined that while their infrastructure capabilities are solid, their IoT components are still a bit immature when compared to our needs. However, given the rapid and substantial investment in IoT, those platforms do look very promising. As a result, we anticipate that these will mature quickly, providing us the ability to replace some of the more generic IoT components of our solution. This should help us increase time-to-market for new functionality while reducing legacy code debt, application maintenance, and overall related costs.It really is an exciting time for all of us and I certainly don't need to summarize the benefits of IoT or the opportunities that it represents to anyone reading this article. Rather, my intention is to share our Industrial Scientific IoT journey in the hope that it might provide some insight to those who are considering a similar path. With IoT, the line between IT and "the business" has become quite blurry. This isn't surprising given that IoT represents the collision and intersection of Information Technology and Operational Technology. In my opinion, this is a good thing as it increases the role and value of IT but also magnifies the importance and need for strong IT leadership. As IT leaders in 2017, we are faced with a plethora of opportunities, challenges, solutions, platforms, and partners who are all willing to sell us their wares. Connectivity has become ubiquitous and as a result, there is no shortage of data. Cloud platform providers offer low-risk consumption based opportunities to jump start and accelerate powerful solutions in ways that simply weren't possible even just a couple of years ago. Navigating this landscape can be daunting. Of course, at the end of the day, our success is measured not by the technologies we implement but rather by whether or not we are addressing and solving real problems and creating value for those who use our solutions. If we maintain our focus and don't lose sight of this important point, navigating becomes easier and we all benefit greatly. With IoT, the line between IT and "the business" has become quite blurryDavid DiLeo
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