For manufacturers of connected devices, one important benefit of linking products into the Internet of Things is the ability to better understand how those products are being used in the wild. Connectivity makes obtaining this usage data—which ranges from knowing when a product is first brought online to tracking usage patterns over time to evaluating how a firmware update impacts usage—far easier to obtain and more reliable, since a manufacturer must no longer rely on things like customer surveys to obtain this information.
Ayla Networks, which works with device manufacturers to connect their products to the IoT, is releasing a new service called Insights that will provide product-usage data to manufacturers that employ Ayla’s IoT platform. Most of Ayla’s customers manufacture heating and air conditioning systems, smoke detectors, home appliances and lighting fixtures. Better understanding how these products are used can help manufacturers better design products with their customers’ interests in mind, explains Vish Pai, the product manager for Ayla Networks’ IoT platform.
“In the past, manufacturers made things but didn’t know how they were used,” Pai says. “Ayla’s Insight gives real-time visibility into when the ordered product shipped, when the user connected it, how often it’s used and from where. And then the manufacturers can take actions based on what they see from the data.”
Ayla’s Insight service creates a lifecycle dataset for each device, starting with its point of manufacture and shipping information. When a user registers and begins utilizing the product, that manufacturing and shipping data is married with the information that the user shared during registration. The dataset grows as the user selects settings; for a heating or cooling system, for example, this would include temperature settings, zone temperatures or programmed settings.
Being able to access both real-time usage data and usage data collected over time, Pai says, would allow manufacturers to better understand how usage patterns correlate with maintenance issues.
Additionally, Ayla Insights enables manufacturers to test feature options using an over-the-air (OTA) firmware update, either directly on the product or via a mobile app, and then watch for patterns based on how customers use these features in, say, geographic areas or in relation to demographic information that users provided at the time of registration. Manufacturers could also perform A/B testing by releasing these updates to a segment of users and then evaluating how they respond to new features.
All of this knowledge, in turn, could help manufacturers understand underlying performance issues, Pai explains, and ultimately improve the product’s capabilities and performance.
The service is offered to Ayla IoT platform users in three tiers: Basic Insights, Advanced Insights and Designer Insights. In all cases, pricing is based on the amount of usage data Ayla collects. Basic Insights provides a configurable dashboard for reports on device connectivity and customer usage. The Advanced Insights tier also provides metrics related to a user’s vertical marketplace. Finally, the Designer Insights tier allows manufacturers to configure and customize the reports and metrics they’ll receive.
It’s worth noting that the term “IoT platform” can be as difficult to define as the Internet of Things itself, and while some platform providers have the ability to share usage data, others do not. It depends on which slice of the connectivity pie the provider delivers.
Some IoT platform providers specialize in the hardware layer, which generally consists of sensors that transmit data either directly to the cloud or to some type of aggregator, such as a gateway. Others develop and support the application layer, which is where usage data would be collected. Moving up the stack, some providers handle cloud-based data filtering and management, serving as a sort of hub for incoming data from the hardware and application layers, and linking this information out to third parties through application programming interfaces (APIs) or enterprise software systems.
Ayla Networks’ IoT platform starts with software agents embedded on the chips that device manufacturers can add to their products, and extends all the way through the stack, which means it has the ability to track usage data from end to end. Other platform providers that support only one part of the large data ecosystem would not likely be able to generate this data stream for customers, Pai says. In those cases, the application software provider can (and does) generate usage data. This app developer might then serve up this information to the manufacturer, likely through reports, in order to provide visibility similar to what the Ayla Insights product is designed to provide. Or the application developer might send usage data to another party, such as a data analytics service or a customer relationship management software company, with which the manufacturer already has a relationship.