1248 Universal IoT Device Manager

In our previous start-ups we successfully grew large connected-products businesses (AlertMe:
Connected Home platform, Amino: IPTV platform, Actix: Mobile Phone management
platform). But most of our companies’ time and money (~80%) was spent managing IoT
INFRASTRUCTURE – devices, gateways, networks – rather than on delivering the actual
headline value-proposition itself. This experience is typical, and inhibits the growth of the
Internet of Things (IoT) market.
Connected applications can be for Home, Factory, Farming, Healthcare, Smart city, Energy
management or any other vertical. Solution vendors need to focus their precious time, money,
unique skills & domain knowledge on developing their proposition’s sensors and software
algorithms which capture data and turn it into value – not on managing infrastructure.
1248 has therefore determined a real gap in the IoT Market: Device Management (DM), a
service to automate the life-cycle of IoT infrastructure. DM manages edge devices (e.g.
connected streetlights, pig feeders or home thermostats) & the gateways connecting them to
the Internet. DM includes secure device “onboarding”, version management, uptime
monitoring, triage and diagnosis.
In particular we are focussed on Universal DM, i.e. one service able to manage multiple
heterogeneous IoT edge standards. Fully-automated DM could bring a step-change solution to
a problem faced by all IoT services as they scale.
It’s a huge market: Globally there are already more connected devices than people, with
numbers growing at a CAGR of 25% [Cisco]. The ratio of connected-devices to humans is
increasing by 10x each decade. At the turn of this century, people had one connected device
each (a PC). Today they have 10 or more connected devices each. IoT continues that journey
to 100+ devices each in the 2020’s. These cannot be managed manually, because we humans
are increasingly time-poor.