The following are news announcements made during the past week:
PRESS RELEASE:
CalAmp, CargoSense Team Up to Offer Telematics to Secure Global Airline’s High-Value Cargo
CalAmp (Nasdaq: CAMP), a telematics pioneer leading transformation in a global connected economy, has announced that it has entered into a partnership with CargoSense, a Software—as-a‐Service (SaaS) company that provides logistics oversight for supply chain networks. This partnership will deliver critical telematics information on high—value, sensitive air cargo for one of the world’s largest global airlines headquartered in the United States.
The solution will provide the global airline’s customers with real—time data and analytics through reports on valuable shipments such as pharmaceuticals, wine, electronics, live freight and perishables that require specific environmental monitoring during transport.
“In supply chain logistics, the game changer is the ability to monitor the health and status of air cargo using IoT solutions so the global airline can provide value—added services and visibility to its business customers and passengers,” said Paul Washicko, senior vice president and general manager of CalAmp’s Software and Subscription Services business. “We are pioneering an effective and efficient way of maintaining control and monitoring the condition of high—value cargo with detailed real—time environmental data to optimize safe transport from departure to arrival.”
The CargoSense platform will ingest pre—, post— and in—flight data collected from CalAmp’s SC1000 and SC1100 telematics gateways and iOn Tag smart sensor tags that monitor location, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, shock, light and vibration. CargoSense analyzes the aggregated data from the sensor devices via an API feed from the CalAmp platform to detect critical environmental conditions and movement patterns from one flight segment to the next. This provides the global airline with granular information and greater insight into shipment processes and assists in meeting mandatory reporting requirements on high—value cargo.
“Being able to provide peace of mind and ensuring trust is imperative for airline customers shipping valuable goods,” said CargoSense’s CEO, Richard Kilmer. “Through our partnership with CalAmp, the global airline will gain real—time insights into the exact status of all its cargo through our comprehensive logistics solution that is unparalleled in transport monitoring today.”
PRESS RELEASE:
SATO Intros IoT-Equipped Mobile Printer
SATO, a leading global provider of Auto-ID solutions that empower workforces and streamline operations announced it launched its new PW208NX IoT-equipped rugged mobile printer designed for the printing of markdown labels, price tag labels and delivery labels in heavy use front-line operational environments.
With an estimated market size of $2.29 trillion worldwide, the e-commerce sector has seen remarkable 23.2% growth in 2017, quadruple the rate of traditional retail. Double-digit growth is expected until at least 20211. Widespread e-commerce usage requires retail and logistics providers to adopt ever more sophisticated technology to enable their workforces to handle the load.
The new 2-inch mobile printer features robust connectivity, with support for SATO’s unique AEP (application enabled printing) enterprise label printing platform which enables smart and connected apps for versatile accessibility and expandability. It has also been designed to support the cloud-based IoT maintenance service SOS (SATO Online Services) to identify issues before they become critical, which helps to prevent downtime.
With AEP functionality, NFC and iOS support, the printer enables expandability and flexibility of use, which is key for a wide range of uses both indoors and outdoors at QSR outlets, food production facilities, distribution centers and on-the-go for deliveries.
With its polycarbonate body, the PW208NX features high shock resistance and impact absorption when dropped. High quality elastomer on its edges absorbs impacts and provides rugged durability to protect the printer while out in the field. It also features an intuitive key design and universal icons for easy operation.
Additionally, the printer supports linerless labels, to allow users to reduce their environmental footprint by using less paper and eliminating waste.
“We are excited to introduce a best-in-class IoT mobile printer to the market,” said Noriyasu Yamada, SATO Chief Product Planning Officer. “As e-commerce needs continue to grow, smart hardware designed for the IoT era is a must. We have listened carefully to the pain points of the market to develop an expandable, evolving product that enables better connectivity to improve ROI for customers.”
The global launch will begin with APAC from February 2018 and subsequent phased roll out to Europe and North America.
PRESS RELEASE:
EVIO Joins Altizon’s Global Partner Network to Bring IIoT to Industrial Automation Market
Altizon, a global industrial IIoT platform company, and EVIO Pvt Ltd., a worldwide industrial automation engineering service provider, has announced that the two companies have joined forces to help their mutual clients accelerate delivery of their IIoT projects. EVIO, which services a large client base of well-known global brands in the chemical, automotive, manufacturing and energy management vertical industries, can now harness the power of Altizon’s Datonis IIoT platform for large scale IIoT projects.
The Internet of Things is a compelling investment for manufacturers: According to recent research from Statistica, Discrete Manufacturing, Transportation/Logistics, and Utilities will lead all industries in IoT spending by 2020, averaging $40B each. Improving the accuracy, speed, and scale of supply chains is an area many organizations are concentrating on with IoT.
Datonis helps accelerate IT/OT integration by quickly connecting diverse industrial assets and launching new applications over a hybrid infrastructure with edge computing, advanced in-stream analytics and deep learning capabilities. Altizon’s Hybrid IoT platform is massively scalable with support for device management, big-data analytics and machine learning with end to end enterprise-grade security.
Atul Apte, Executive Director, EVIO: “IIoT is the upcoming technology for the industry to improve upon process, cost and profitability from a sustainability point of view. We elected to partner with Altizon, a pioneer in IIoT, because of the rapid value the company and its team has created for global enterprises in smart manufacturing, modernizing asset performance management and delivering new business models for service. Their aggressive market approach, and priority support given to developing a robust partner ecosystem will enable us to meet the increased IIoT demand we are seeing from our clients in an accelerated fashion.”
Vinay Nathan, CEO, Altizon: “We are excited to have EVIO join our growing network of global partners. Their depth of industry expertise lends itself perfectly to harnessing the power of Datonis IIoT Platform to support enterprises as they adopt IIoT for digital transformation.”
EVIO is a member of Altizon’s 30+ global partner network. Together with its partner ecosystem, Altizon is continuing the company’s mission to ease and accelerate IIoT adoption.
PRESS RELEASE:
Medigate Launches Dedicated Medical Device Security Platform to Counter Cyber Risk
Medigate has announced the launch of its dedicated medical device security platform for healthcare providers, the industry’s first and only solution to secure medical devices that are connected to electronic medical records, enterprise networks and servers, and the internet. The cloud-based security platform empowers healthcare IT and security teams to protect enterprises, securing data and safeguarding patient safety and privacy from malware, ransomware and other advanced cyberattacks targeting networked medical devices.
Medigate provides three capabilities essential for effective IT security: visibility into all network connected devices, detection of potential threats and automated prevention of attacks. These capabilities are specifically designed for the healthcare industry, differentiating Medigate from other solutions.
Medigate will showcase the platform at the HIMSS Conference & Exhibition March 5-9, 2018 in Las Vegas at booth 8600-52.
“We’ve seen a rise in cyberattacks targeting the healthcare sector in recent years due to vulnerabilities within medical device networks. This creates a critical exposure within the patient-provider information flow, and can even affect the quality of patient care,” said Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO of Medigate. “We’ve built a security platform to tightly protect this patient-provider data so that both parties can rely on the accuracy of critical treatment plans and confidentiality of their personal and private information.”
In recent years cyberattacks have become increasingly sophisticated, with breaches costing the United States healthcare system $6 billion worth of damage in 2015 according to Bloomberg[1].
Cybercriminals use backdoors and botnets to exploit devices and enter networks. For example, MEDJACK, first discovered in 2015, is an advanced zero-day attack, which hackers used to specifically target the health care industry, stealing valuable patient data. MEDJACK showed just how vulnerable medical devices like x-ray machines and MRI scanners are to attacks. Using malware to exploit older versions of Windows, hackers went undetected by endpoint security software. While MEDJACK specifically targeted healthcare, medical devices also use COTS (commercial off the shelf) operating systems, which are rarely patched, and so can also be hit by random cross-sector cyberattacks that aren’t targeting healthcare specifically.
Not surprisingly, the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks has led to a greater demand for effective network security among providers. In fact, a 2017 HIMSS cybersecurity survey reported that CIOs named network security as the leading IT priority for improvement, ranking ahead of other IT issues like patient safety and improved work processes.
“In addition to triggering a host of network disturbances, data breaches pose a serious risk to patient safety, as attacks can lead to clinical errors, such as incorrect dosing and misdiagnoses of diseases,” said Langer. “Medigate’s security platform prevents intrusions such as MEDJACK and instills confidence in the privacy and safety of medical relationships.”
PRESS RELEASE:
InfluxData Raises $35 Million to Accelerate Growth and Meet Demand for Time Series Database Metrics, Events Platform
InfluxData, the modern Open Source Platform built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications, has announced it has closed a $35 million Series C round of funding led by Sapphire Ventures, which funds category-leading growth technology companies. Round participants included new investor Harmony Partners, and existing investors Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures. The funding will propel the company’s leadership in the growing time series database category.
Today’s funding will be used to expand Sales, Marketing and R&D to meet the increasing demand and further build out of the InfluxData platform. In addition, this investment will fuel the company’s rapid acceleration internationally, where it is already seeing significant revenue and growth. The funding brings the company’s total funding to $60 million. In addition, Anders Ranum, partner, Sapphire Ventures, will join the Board of Directors.
“Development teams are facing steep barriers in capturing and analyzing all the data available to them in making smart decisions for their business given new capabilities in machine learning, internet of things, and artificial intelligence,” said Ranum of Sapphire Ventures. “We saw a significant opportunity emerging with time series platforms, and it was clear that InfluxData is the market leader. More importantly, it is the only time series platform that was architected from the ground up to handle time series data.”
“The demand for our category-leading platform is accelerating rapidly as developers and operators come to understand the power of a purpose-built time series platform to run their next-generation IoT, monitoring and analytics applications,” said Evan Kaplan, InfluxData CEO. “This latest round of funding is an exciting opportunity for us to work with the amazing team at Sapphire Ventures to meet the needs of our expanding customer base both domestically and internationally, as well as deliver on our continued investment in building quality open source time series software for the broader development community.”
InfluxData is seeing exceptional growth fueled by two major industry trends – the rapid instrumentation or “sensorification” of the physical world driven by the increasing investment in IoT systems and the explosion in the software world of cloud native applications and services, all of which are being instrumented for real-time visibility and control. This “Age of Instrumentation” is fueling the growth for purpose-built time series platforms that can support the critical requirement for real-time processing of the myriad of metrics and events to deliver insight and competitive advantage to data driven organizations. To date InfluxData has more than 115,000 active sites running the platform on a regular basis and more than 400 paying customers, including Cisco Systems, Coupa Software, IBM, Nordstrom, Tesla and SAP.
“We researched the best time series platforms and chose InfluxData because it is highly performant, provided high availability, and was more cost effective than the SaaS solutions we were considering,” said Christina Abraham, VP, Global Cloud Infrastructure & Operations at SAP Ariba. “InfluxData was easy to implement and is now the primary data store to collect metrics and events for SAP Ariba operations. InfluxData provides the basis for all the visualizations and alerting that is critical to our business.”
Over the past 12 months InfluxData has continued to extend its position as the market leader among time series database management systems, the fastest growing database category, validated by DB-Engines’ latest results. For more on these industry results, see: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking/time+series+dbms.
“InfluxData is helping us provide improved visibility across our business into areas that we previously couldn’t see,” said Sanket Naik, VP, Cloud Infrastructure and Security, Coupa Software. “It has allowed us to do anomaly detection, and proactively identify and fix issues before customers find them. We chose InfluxCloud because it provides the scalability and high availability that our business requires.”
PRESS RELEASE:
Stanley Healthcare Offers Cloud-Based IoT Platform for Monitoring Environment of Care
Stanley Healthcare, a market leading provider of visibility and analytics solutions for the healthcare industry, has announced a new cloud-based solution for monitoring conditions in the environment of care. The Stanley Healthcare IoT platform* integrates smart sensors over a cloud-based network to enable small hospitals, outpatient service providers, pharmacies and other organizations to easily monitor cold storage and other aspects of their operations that must be maintained at specific conditions for safe patient care.
“With this IoT platform, we saw an opportunity to make our expertise in real-time monitoring available to a wider range of healthcare organizations,” said Gabi Daniely, Vice President of Product Strategy & Business Development, Stanley Healthcare. “Monitoring different aspects of the environment of care is a requirement for many organizations along the care continuum, including critical access hospitals, outpatient service providers, physician groups, laboratories and pharmacies. Whether it’s storage conditions for pharmaceuticals or vaccines, differential pressure for isolation rooms or Compound Sterile Preparations (CSP), monitoring the status of CO tanks, or any of a number of other applications, these organizations need to monitor and record conditions on a regular basis. The IoT platform lets them do that easily and affordably.”
The IoT platform was developed based on Stanley Healthcare’s extensive experience with monitoring applications in healthcare; the company’s AeroScout Real-time Location System is a leading solution for Environmental Monitoring in hospitals. The new platform combines features and services essential to the unique requirements of healthcare monitoring:
Designed for healthcare: The IoT platform is specifically made for healthcare applications, with measurement, notification and reporting options that support compliance. Calibration services are also available to recognized standards, such as those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST);
Cost effective: The IoT platform offers a low total cost of ownership with minimal setup costs and a tiered monthly subscription. Healthcare organizations can immediately realize efficiency savings and avoid costly events such as the loss of items in a malfunctioning refrigeration unit;
Flexible and scalable: The platform is an effective solution for a wide range of organizations and many different monitoring needs. It supports multiple sensors and is scalable to cover everything from a handful of devices in one location to thousands of devices across multiple sites;
Secure: Stanley Healthcare employs best-in-class cloud services to ensure maximum data security, with High Availability and multi-tenant capabilities. In addition, Stanley Healthcare monitors the platform to proactively address issues;
Easy to implement and use: Setup and configuration of the solution is straightforward, and can be done by the customer or with the assistance of Stanley Healthcare’s authorized partners. For users, the mobile application has all the necessary tools to monitor and respond to events, including documenting corrective action.
The platform combines IoT-enabled sensors with a mobile application to receive alerts, see the status of devices and create compliance reports. A web-based Cloud Manager enables administrators to manage users and environments across multiple locations. The initial offering of the platform will support a range of temperature and humidity sensors, with differential pressure sensors and a contact closure device available shortly.
The IoT platform along with Stanley Healthcare’s other visibility, analytics and patient safety solutions will be on view at the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada, March 5-9, 2018. Find Stanley Healthcare at booth # 2243 and in the Interoperability Showcase.
PRESS RELEASE:
IoT Company Acuity Brands Acquires Lucid Design Group
Acuity Brands, Inc. (NYSE: AYI) has announced it has acquired Lucid Design Group, Inc. (Lucid), an Oakland, CA-based provider of building analytics through its industry-leading BuildingOS business intelligence platform. The Company believes the combination of Lucid’s BuildingOS platform and Acuity Brands’ large installed base of networked sensors for lighting and building automation controls and its Atrius Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem will provide the industry’s most comprehensive building operations and analytics platform, enabling customers to have unparalleled insights about their energy use and other building operations.
Lucid provides a data and analytics platform to make data-driven decisions to improve building efficiency and drive energy conservation and savings. Its SaaS-based BuildingOS platform enables owners, operators, and occupants to gain powerful insights into the operations of their buildings, providing the ability to make them more efficient and improve the performance of the people and businesses utilizing these strategic assets.
“Lucid’s technology will allow us to extend the power of our digital networked lighting, building management and IoT solutions,” said Laurent J. Vernerey, President of the Acuity Technology Group and Executive Vice President of Acuity Brands, Inc. “The Lucid acquisition supports our strategy of further unlocking the value of Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities within buildings by connecting advanced sensory network solutions with the broader integrated building data required to drive better operational and business performance.”
BuildingOS will remain an independent and open platform focused on integrating any data source associated with a building, from modern digital lighting networks to legacy systems and operations data. Lucid has built integrations into over 180 different building data systems and services, including systems tracking utility data, building automation systems, work order systems, and property management solutions. The platform will continue to be data source agnostic and focus on the power of analytics applied to integrated data streams.
“We are excited by the opportunity to leverage Acuity Brands’ broad IoT and control capabilities to deliver a more complete solution to our customers,” said Will Coleman, CEO, Lucid Design Group, Inc. “Buildings are being transformed by data and intelligent systems in the same way as every other industry, helping to address and manage unnecessary costs, lost revenue, and productivity deficiencies. Combining the intelligence Lucid’s BuildingOS platform will provide with Acuity Brands’ digital lighting-based sensory networks and Atrius software platform will help customers unlock the value of the expanding IoT landscape within buildings.”
BuildingOS has been adopted by more than 500 customers and provides analytics for more than 15,000 buildings. It empowers over 12,000 energy and sustainability management professionals in maximizing energy efficiency while improving occupant satisfaction within their buildings. The acquisition of Lucid is not expected to have a material impact on the fiscal 2018 consolidated financial performance of Acuity Brands. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.