Simplify your IoT projects with the IBM Watson IoT Platform

It is well known that the Internet of Things opens up new opportunities and business models, and provides information of very high value that could never have been obtained before. But are all the advantages it offers really beneficial? Undoubtedly, yes. And, hand in hand with IBM technology, it's really easy to take advantage of them.

The technology provided by IBM through Watson IoT makes it possible to bring the Internet of Things closer to our organizations, processes and projects.

Knowing what is happening around you enables capabilities to act not only more effectively, but also in advance. In many occasions, predicting a critical situation and acting in advance can mean enormous cost savings for a company.

That's where IBM's IoT solutions come in, providing tools that facilitate the tasks of device connection and administration, data ingest and storage, and analytics, even in real time.

Among all these solutions, we must highlight the IoT Platform, the SaaS service that accelerates the process of immersion and initiation of an IoT project.

This platform presents functionalities that allow a global, simple and intuitive management of the deployed devices and the information they provide. In addition, it allows to connect additional services in a very simple way, services that include analytical capabilities, event processing and blockchain. In this way, all the information registered and provided by the devices is automatically processed in the platform, obtaining in real time metrics and calculated indicators that are very useful for users, both those who need to know the status of the deployments to know if everything is working properly, and those responsible who require a higher level vision.

The management of devices allows to know a great amount of information about them: metadata and hardware information (model, serial number, etc.), if they are connected or not and registers of activity, diagnosis and connection. Here you can see, at a glance, the latest messages received from each, which again quickly provides a global view of the operation of that device to the user. Are the data arriving correctly according to the stipulated parameters, so you can conclude that everything is working well? Are the data arriving at irregular intervals, denoting that the device is suffering problems of connection or operation? Now, the task of detecting system malfunctions is immediate.

The tools provided by the platform allow the messages received to be disaggregated in order to obtain the value data. It is a very simple method that consists of accessing the body of the message and taking only those fields of interest. Simple transformations can be made on these fields before they are registered, so that the stored information is molded to the established requirements; for example, a temperature data obtained in degrees Fahrenheit can be transformed to degrees Celsius. In the same way, the raw messages are also stored, thus allowing a future consultation of historical data.

In addition, it offers a completely customizable dashboard. You can display as many graphs as you like so as not to lose traceability on the status of the display. It also allows to list all the registered devices in order to obtain, in a visual and clear way, a global vision of the whole system.

The deployment of all these tools and utilities is practically immediate. In an effective and simple way, one can assemble the platform completely and configure it to his liking; taking the data that most interest him of his devices and visualizing them in real time.

In addition to all the functionalities mentioned so far, the IoT Platform can be associated with the additional services listed above.

A highlight is the Watson IoT Platform Analytics. It is a data analysis service offering a wide range of analytical and statistical functions. In addition to all the default ones, the user can add as many as he wants from his own crop. In this way, code can be implemented that, for example, makes use of its own predictive models.

The integration of this service is immediate, as all the data from the sensors that have been stored on the IoT platform become visible to the activated analytical functions, without the need for any configuration on the part of the user. Therefore, once this tool is activated it is possible to proceed to analyse both the data already registered in the system and the data that are arriving.

In this way, in a very short time results can be obtained that will provide information of great interest to our organizations.

In conclusion, never before has it been so easy to take advantage of all the benefits of IoT deployment. The benefits of the platform lie in the ease with which you can carry out tasks of device control and data processing, bringing all the possibilities offered by this technology to all types of users.