As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain momentum across every industry, your company has made the decision to join the industry 4.0 revolution. You have identified the need for an IoT solution to supercharge your company for the tremendous opportunity ahead. Yet, there is also a lot of uncertainty about how to best integrate supporting technology into existing IT architectures and operating models. While many executives are still trying to determine how to accurately assess IoT opportunities, the most important question is how to ensure the current IT infrastructure can support such a venture.

Why plug-and-play may not be a good idea

Unfortunately, many businesses are facing limited capabilities in implementing IoT solutions in their already-complex architectures. And there’s a good reason: IoT technology is not a simple plug-and-play solution. Easy plug-and-play solutions may sound ideal at first. Plug-and-play IoT provides a simple internet-enabled device to interact with their machines. But for the most part, plug-and-play offerings are inflexible. They cannot withstand the pace of innovation. Also, they are not suitable for the long term as you cannot build on them. Plug and play usually lack hindsight and neglect the realities of a specific situation. What’s needed is agile custom development and delivery.

What makes a custom IoT solution a better choice?

As the name implies, custom IoT solutions are specifically designed for your unique needs. Our team along with your team comes up with the features that can solve your business pain points. Then you go through the complete product development process(prototype, MVP, final product, etc) and we deliver the custom solution to you. This is of course an oversimplification, but you get the general picture.

Chances are you have a business process that is similar to others in your industry, such as standard best practices for production operations or regulatory compliance. But, we also bet that you have an exclusive twist on that process to gain a competitive edge. In this case, you cannot tap your IoT potential by just accessing standard industry solutions. You need something that fits your business needs and speciality.

Through custom development, you can use these standard industry solutions as a starting point and then extend and customize them for quick, cost-effective innovation that addresses your specific business requirements. Custom IoT considers long-term potentials and developments. It makes sure that you have enough openness and elasticity to accommodate newer approaches.

Custom IoT solution v/s plug and play IoT solution? Which one should you choose?

There are many factors that come into this equation, and the answer varies according to your unique situation. Let’s break down these factors, and see what all applies in your situation.

Cost – The initial cost for a custom solution will be way higher. Unlike mass-market solutions, custom solutions are made just for you, and that’s going to cost a bit. By contrast, the initial cost of a plug and play solution will be much less. Simply because the vendor can afford to since they’re selling the same solution to many people.

But in the long run, a custom solution may be cheaper. The IP for a custom solution will be yours. And you only have to pay for what you need, and exactly what you need.

Deployment – As you can expect, a plug and play solution can be deployed real quick, while a custom solution will take time to develop, test, and deploy.

But deployment is likely to go more smoothly for a custom product. While developing the product, all use cases, all integrations, of them have been already taken into account. In the case of a plug and play solution, issues may come up that wasn’t expected. You may realise that the solution doesn’t fit with the workflow within your organisation.

Quality – Quality is how aligned the product will be to your business requirements. With a custom solution, it will have all the features you’ll need, and none you don’t need. When a vendor is building a commercial plug and play product, they consider all the possible use cases for it. But chances are they’d have missed a couple of features that you specifically you need. And this applies to any vendor. With a plug and play product, you’ll be making some compromises in terms of the features. And there will be some features you don’t want.

This won’t be an issue with a custom solution.

Security – Without focusing on security from the outset, many things can go wrong. Entire systems, automation processes, and devices can be exposed to errors and external harm. As a rule of thumb, custom solutions are more secure than mass-market products because security is a central constituent of a custom IoT solution.

Cracking into a mass-market solution means hackers can get into any user using the solution. So it’s more likely hackers’ efforts are going to pay off. By cracking into a custom solution, with all that effort, hackers may gain nothing. So hackers are more likely to target mass-market solutions.

Scalability – Scalability is the capability of a service to adapt both to the constantly changing environment and to potential future requirements. For example, this can be the rapid addition of a growing number of connected devices to a device fleet without any negative impact on performance and capabilities. Both vertical and horizontal scalability is essential to any system designed to tackle ever-growing data volumes. Many solutions developed for the mass market does offer easy scalability. But generally, a custom solution is more easily scalable, and of course, you can design it for easy scalability.

Our solution? A platform where you can get your custom IoT solution developed

Take the SNT department of the Indian Railways Agra Division, for example. Over 1 million passengers and hundreds of businesses rely on the Agra Divison of Indian railways every day. Operating more than 100 trains is quite a challenge when you consider that everything must run on time, especially the ability of Signal and Telecommunication’s maintenance facilities to react rapidly to operational stresses. With 3Point3 Labs, the SNT department of Agra Division Indian Railway was able to deeply transform its end-to-end maintenance operations from the core and throughout the system by extracting and transmitting endless data daily through onboard collectors over the ground network and analyzing it all in real-time.

Whether your company is in the middle of its own digital journey or about to start, waiting for the “perfect” solution to arrive will not give you a competitive advantage. With us, you can get a one-of-a-kind solution that differentiates your business from the competition through digital transformation.

What are you waiting for?

Find out how 3point3 Labs can help your business by delivering a custom IoT solution. Contact us at [email protected]

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain momentum across every industry, your company has made the decision to join the industry 4.0 revolution. You have identified the need for an IoT solution to supercharge your company for the tremendous opportunity ahead. Yet, there is also a lot of uncertainty about how to best integrate supporting technology into existing IT architectures and operating models. While many executives are still trying to determine how to accurately assess IoT opportunities, the most important question is how to ensure the current IT infrastructure can support such a venture.

Why plug-and-play may not be a good idea

Unfortunately, many businesses are facing limited capabilities in implementing IoT solutions in their already-complex architectures. And there’s a good reason: IoT technology is not a simple plug-and-play solution. Easy plug-and-play solutions may sound ideal at first. Plug-and-play IoT provides a simple internet-enabled device to interact with their machines. But for the most part, plug-and-play offerings are inflexible. They cannot withstand the pace of innovation. Also, they are not suitable for the long term as you cannot build on them. Plug and play usually lack hindsight and neglect the realities of a specific situation. What’s needed is agile custom development and delivery.

What makes a custom IoT solution a better choice?

As the name implies, custom IoT solutions are specifically designed for your unique needs. Our team along with your team comes up with the features that can solve your business pain points. Then you go through the complete product development process(prototype, MVP, final product, etc) and we deliver the custom solution to you. This is of course an oversimplification, but you get the general picture.

Chances are you have a business process that is similar to others in your industry, such as standard best practices for production operations or regulatory compliance. But, we also bet that you have an exclusive twist on that process to gain a competitive edge. In this case, you cannot tap your IoT potential by just accessing standard industry solutions. You need something that fits your business needs and speciality.

Through custom development, you can use these standard industry solutions as a starting point and then extend and customize them for quick, cost-effective innovation that addresses your specific business requirements. Custom IoT considers long-term potentials and developments. It makes sure that you have enough openness and elasticity to accommodate newer approaches.

Custom IoT solution v/s plug and play IoT solution? Which one should you choose?

There are many factors that come into this equation, and the answer varies according to your unique situation. Let’s break down these factors, and see what all applies in your situation.

Cost – The initial cost for a custom solution will be way higher. Unlike mass-market solutions, custom solutions are made just for you, and that’s going to cost a bit. By contrast, the initial cost of a plug and play solution will be much less. Simply because the vendor can afford to since they’re selling the same solution to many people.

But in the long run, a custom solution may be cheaper. The IP for a custom solution will be yours. And you only have to pay for what you need, and exactly what you need.

Deployment – As you can expect, a plug and play solution can be deployed real quick, while a custom solution will take time to develop, test, and deploy.

But deployment is likely to go more smoothly for a custom product. While developing the product, all use cases, all integrations, of them have been already taken into account. In the case of a plug and play solution, issues may come up that wasn’t expected. You may realise that the solution doesn’t fit with the workflow within your organisation.

Quality – Quality is how aligned the product will be to your business requirements. With a custom solution, it will have all the features you’ll need, and none you don’t need. When a vendor is building a commercial plug and play product, they consider all the possible use cases for it. But chances are they’d have missed a couple of features that you specifically you need. And this applies to any vendor. With a plug and play product, you’ll be making some compromises in terms of the features. And there will be some features you don’t want.

This won’t be an issue with a custom solution.

Security – Without focusing on security from the outset, many things can go wrong. Entire systems, automation processes, and devices can be exposed to errors and external harm. As a rule of thumb, custom solutions are more secure than mass-market products because security is a central constituent of a custom IoT solution.

Cracking into a mass-market solution means hackers can get into any user using the solution. So it’s more likely hackers’ efforts are going to pay off. By cracking into a custom solution, with all that effort, hackers may gain nothing. So hackers are more likely to target mass-market solutions.

Scalability – Scalability is the capability of a service to adapt both to the constantly changing environment and to potential future requirements. For example, this can be the rapid addition of a growing number of connected devices to a device fleet without any negative impact on performance and capabilities. Both vertical and horizontal scalability is essential to any system designed to tackle ever-growing data volumes. Many solutions developed for the mass market does offer easy scalability. But generally, a custom solution is more easily scalable, and of course, you can design it for easy scalability.

Our solution? A platform where you can get your custom IoT solution developed

Take the SNT department of the Indian Railways Agra Division, for example. Over 1 million passengers and hundreds of businesses rely on the Agra Divison of Indian railways every day. Operating more than 100 trains is quite a challenge when you consider that everything must run on time, especially the ability of Signal and Telecommunication’s maintenance facilities to react rapidly to operational stresses. With 3Point3 Labs, the SNT department of Agra Division Indian Railway was able to deeply transform its end-to-end maintenance operations from the core and throughout the system by extracting and transmitting endless data daily through onboard collectors over the ground network and analyzing it all in real-time.

Whether your company is in the middle of its own digital journey or about to start, waiting for the “perfect” solution to arrive will not give you a competitive advantage. With us, you can get a one-of-a-kind solution that differentiates your business from the competition through digital transformation.

What are you waiting for?

Find out how 3point3 Labs can help your business by delivering a custom IoT solution. Contact us at [email protected]