SEATTLE, Nov. 20, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Buddy Platform, Inc, today announced availability of its new platform that hosts and manages data generated by any connected device, for the first time enabling measurement of a device from the moment it's turned on throughout its entire lifecycle. This data, often referred to as "telemetry data", conveys information about the performance and usage of the device, and is now accessible from any common BI tool. Buddy helps answer the question, 'How is this device being used?', and 'Is it performing like we designed it to?". Buddy is live with customers in industries such as aviation, automotive (connected cars), retail, connected home, consumer electronics and embedded silicon.
While most connected, or "Internet of Things" devices have functionality to enable control or monitoring (such as from a mobile app), relatively few are making performance and usage data accessible for analysis. By giving product management, engineering and support teams access to this data, and the insights that are derived from it, organizations can dramatically increase their ability to build better products and support the customers of these products in-market.
"Now that devices as varied as door locks, light bulbs, kiosks and cars are all becoming connected, there's a huge amount of data that can give manufacturers exactly the information they need to support and improve their products," said David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy Platform, Inc. "Device manufacturers are not cloud infrastructure companies. They've built technology into their products to control the device, but haven't built the infrastructure to access and use the device's telemetry data to improve the product and delight customers. Buddy makes it fast and easy to access those insights and immediately understand more deeply how customers are using these kinds of IoT devices," continued McLauchlan.
Adding to the challenge is that the regulatory environment for data storage is becoming more complex. Various countries are enacting legislation that specifies how and where personal data may be stored.
Buddy works by hosting a series of regionally sandboxed, global BuddyAPI endpoints to which devices can send their raw telemetry data. This data is pushed into a secure storage infrastructure called BuddyVault, whereupon it is then managed, queried and exposed back to the customer in any form they wish with BuddyView. This may take the form of integrations into common business intelligence tools, or as raw APIs that can be plugged into any customer or M2M scenario.
With the addition of a few lines of code, the Buddy Platform offers the lowest overhead solution for extracting telemetry data from a device, and can make an unprecedented amount of device performance data broadly accessible to an organization, including:
- How is this device being used? Is it performing like we designed it to, is it working as expected?
- What error codes is my device reporting, and how is that affecting the customer experience?
- How many of my devices are being used?
- Where are they?
- When are they used and how often?
- Are they on or off?
- How are my devices communicating with one another? If not, what's not working?
- How are my devices performing with connected ecosystems like smart homes or industrial infrastructure?
Buddy uses standard technologies including REST service over HTTPS, which means any device with Internet connectivity can use Buddy. There are no agents, no heavy runtime to install, and the platform offers access managed, queried subsets of the data, which are available via completely customized JSON APIs.
About Buddy
Not every device company or developer has the resources or expertise to build a hand-crafted, scalable, secure backend to receive and host that data or service their backend needs. Buddy solves exactly this problem, delivering turnkey data ingestion, data sovereignty (physical location and secure sandboxing), application services and real-time visualization via a secure platform, and can accommodate products deployed at global scale. Extract value with just a few lines of code – any device, any data, that's Buddy.