A few years ago it seemed like you could not talk to anyone without hearing about the Internet of Things. Everyone wanted to talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and how soon your fridge would be ordering online shopping for you when you were low on milk. That was the world IoT.nxt was founded in, seven years ago.
“This was when IoT was in its infancy,” says Shane Cooper, COO of IoT.nxt. “We were embarking on a journey to create a horizontal application enablement platform. A platform that allows any edge technology to communicate with each other and a centralised hub.”
But technology moves fast, and nowhere more so than at the intersection between hardware and software.
“We as a business have evolved,” Cooper tells us. “Post-Covid the market has changed, perspectives have changed. A large number of platforms have disappeared, while specialised IoT companies have come to life. Part of the reason for this is because of the difficulty of creating generic IoT solutions.”
The New Internet of Things
It was a new environment, which meant IoT.nxt itself had to adapt to suit it.
“Part of our challenge as a business was accepting that the horizontal platform idea was not a sustainable one. What you have to do is create value and stickiness in your customers,” Cooper says.
IoT.nxt has done that in a number of ways. As a business, IoT.nxt decided to focus on a handful of large products that it could bring to market. It has also ensured that it has the capacity to ingest the large data volumes that edge technologies can produce.
“We use our Edge Raptor software that is based in the cloud, providing us with the oversight that gives us a competitive advantage in the market,” Cooper says. “It means that we have a unique way of digesting data, bringing it into a central hub to be processed, visualised, and incorporated into the system architecture. We can then apply artificial intelligence to allow decisions to be made without human intervention.”
The last element of IoT.nxt’s offering, and the one that Cooper believes is the most important, is its experience dealing with complexity in IoT situations.
“We have had the luxury of engaging in a number of IoT solutions around the world. Frankly, we have paid a lot of school fees in terms of learning what not to do,” Cooper says.
Energy Sector of Things
As the move from generalised to more specialised IoT solutions became clear, the company had to decide exactly where it was going to focus its work. Very quickly it became clear that the energy sector was of interest.
“Most of what we do in the MNO and TelCo space is energy management,” Cooper says. “We have deployed our software at approximately 40,000 base stations and cell sites around the world. In many instances, we are using the technology to reduce energy consumption itself. That is an increasing and attractive part of our future. Wherever you are in the world energy is a problem, even if it is just a matter of understanding how and where your energy is consumed.”
Security Net
IoT.nxt’s work in the energy sector has also brought into contact with the security industry. The company can apply contact sensors for the opening and closing of doors, movement sensors, and cameras supported by AI and tracked to a maintenance plan to ensure that nobody is in the base station who should not be there.
“We are in the business of tracking things,” Cooper says. “In Africa, we have a problem with criminal syndicates that have a way of getting their hand on assets. We can lose entire classrooms in rural areas where shipping containers are used as classrooms.”
IoT.nxt can deploy technology which means the authorities are alerted if there is any movement.
A more complex version of the same technology is deployed to police forces. IoT.nxt uses it to track when weapons are removed from their holsters or used to prevent and track gun thefts.
Returning to the energy sector, South Africa’s power infrastructure is often under strain, with places in the country sometimes having no power for six to eight hours a day. The largely coal-based power sector is another target for syndicates.
“Coal en route to power stations can be offloaded and replaced with rubble, which is then topped with a thin layer of coal,” Cooper tells us. “This means when it ends up in the burner it causes damage and downtime, and the entire power station has to be shut down for repairs.”
To outwit those thieves, IoT.nxt has implemented a combination of geofencing and camera technology, linking together waybridge systems and ERPs to create an alert if trucks deviate from their route at any time.
The Search for an Interesting Problem
The problems that invite potential IoT solutions are many, and so one of IoT.nxt’s challenges is choosing which of those problems to address.
“It goes without saying it has to be commercially attractive,” Cooper says. “There are a number of interesting problems we would love to get stuck into that don’t make commercial sense. But it also has to be a challenge to solve, or you run the risk of being an also-ran and the margins are not that interesting.”
Ultimately, IoT.nxt’s experts like developing solutions for complex systems between devices that were never intended to talk to each other.
“The analogy we use here is if you are in the United Nations you wear those headphones so that no matter what language is spoken, everyone understands it,” Cooper tells us. “Added to that, what makes it interesting is the accumulated data involved, letting you provide useful insights to make better informed decisions on what needs to be done next.”
To extend that metaphor, IoT.nxt is adamant about not confining its solutions to its own IP. For IoT solutions to live up to the promised hype, they must be truly platform-neutral.
“Just about all of what we take to market is our own IP, but we are comfortable working in an ecosystem environment,” says Cooper. “With complex solutions, you have to be part of a broader group of technology providers. The core of our business is that we have very clever engineers and software developers who understand today’s world.”
Looking forward, IoT.nxt has plans for international growth. As part of the Vodaphone family of companies, it has connections with companies on every continent other than Antarctica, and Cooper plans to be solving problems on all of them.
“We are very good at the last mile,” Cooper says. “There are players in the market with off-the-shelf IoT platforms but very little support when this coordination is required. We can go on-site and solve the problem in situ. That is where our strength is.”
