B&B Electronics, a 34-year-old provider of industrial device networking hardware, is relaunching today under a new name. The company also has a renewed mission to service businesses in a range of industrial markets that seek to link their legacy systems with sensor networks, in order to leverage emerging Internet of Things technologies.
The Illinois-based firm, now known as B+B SmartWorx, offers the Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform, which consists of Wzzard edge nodes and Spectre gateways, and is designed to assist systems integrators, value-added-retailers and service providers in helping their industrial-sector customers to quickly deploy secure and scalable IoT applications. The Wzzard nodes are linked to sensors via any industry-standard interface, the company reports, communicating through a mesh network to the B+B gateways using the IEEE 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 2006 radio standard and the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) communication protocol. The gateways are linked to an end user’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platforms, used for remotely controlling equipment.
B+B SmartWorx’s Spectre gateways, which can be linked to a customer’s back-end systems via a wired Ethernet link or wirelessly through a Wi-Fi connection, also employ the MQTT protocol to send sensor data to an end user’s IoT application. In addition, the Spectre gateway contains two slots for accommodating subscriber identity module (SIM) cards, which can be used to transmit or receive data from remote sensor networks or back-end systems via a 4G LTE or 3G cellular link.
B+B SmartWorx has also announced partnerships with more than 10 companies through which it is offering an ecosystem of IoT products and services based on the SmartWorx IoT Edge Processing Network. Among the announced IoT ecosystem partnerships are Cumulocity, which offers a toolkit with which end users can build IoT applications; IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) platform application providers, such as ThingWorx, Davra Networks and PLAT.ONE; integration software providers, such as SeeControl; IoT data analytics services providers, such as Parstream. B+B SmartWorx has announced partnerships with mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) KORE Telematics and Mobius Networks. B+B SmartWorx calls these partnerships its Connected Intelligence Global Partner Ecosystem. MVNOs purchase bulk broadband access from mobile network operators and resell the service to their own customers.
Through these partnerships, the company aims to make it easier to deploy mission-critical industrial IoT networks that combine sensors networks with enterprise applications, in order to support applications such as factory automation or predictive maintenance.
“I’ve been in the M2M space for 25 years,” says Mike Fahrion, B+B SmartWorx’s director of IoT and edge intelligence product development, “and I’ve seen more change [in the industry] in the past two years than in the last decade.” Things are getting incredibly dynamic, and we’re seeing the end of the Wild Wild West of M2M connectivity.”
B+B SmartWorx is positioning itself in a manner than allows it to retain its market position as a hardware provider without attempting to become an all-in-one IoT shop—hence, the partnerships it is fostering. The IoT industry is fragmented and complex, Fahrion says, so B+B considers its long history in legacy hardware systems, as well as its ability to act as a sort of conduit between legacy systems and newer software applications, an important differentiation. The types of IoT applications that the company’s customers deploy, he explains, “are not consumer applications where you can refresh and get a new phone every few years. This [legacy] equipment is in place for 10 or 20 years.”
Glen Allmendinger, the president of IoT market research firm Harbor Research, says that B+B SmartWorx is trying to avoid some missteps made by its competitors that have entered the industrial IoT marketplace with a wider portfolio of offerings. “If you build out an ecosystem of partners,” he states, “you’re not going to compete with some of the types of companies in the [software or integration] service industry.”
Where is B+B SmartWorx likely to see traction? Allmendinger thinks it will emerge in a wide range of industries. “When you say ‘industrial applications,’ people tend to think of it only in terms of manufacturing,” he explains. In fact, he adds, B+B SmartWorx’s IoT platform can be used for a range of mission-critical applications in which highly accurate, real-time or near-real-time data is essential. These include many use cases in the transportation industry, data centers, utilities and health-care industries—in addition to more traditional industrial sectors, such as manufacturing.