North offers expertise across the Internet of Things (IoT), networking and connectivity, and safety and security. Their smart integrated technology solutions focus on transforming the way people, organisations and places work. Continued growth across IoT is a key focus for their industry leading business.
“Daizy has given us the ability to manage devices at scale and to deliver the high levels of service that our customers are looking for.”
Mark Lowe, Business Development Director, North
We caught up with Alasdair Rettie, CTO and Mark Lowe, Business Development Director to find out more about how North’s partnership with Daizy is creating efficient growth in their IoT engagements.
The search for scalability
With many years of IoT project experience, not to mention deployment and management of the National IoT Scotland LoRaWAN network, North already has an excellent understanding of what is required to design, deploy and manage IoT solutions.
It was this experience that drove Alasdair to begin the search for an IoT management platform that could scale with North’s increasing demand. “From the wide range of projects we had delivered, it was clear that in order to manage even larger and more complex IoT deployments, we would need a platform that would allow us to onboard new client projects at PoC stage and then manage them as they scale into the tens of thousands of devices” explained Alasdair.
“Managing a small PoC with a dozen devices and one or two sensor types is one thing, but as IoT projects scale, the management overhead of onboarding devices, managing them in-life and then off-boarding or replacing them can be time consuming and costly.”
Expanding connectivity options
Expanding the range of wireless connectivity options for IoT sensors was another critical component in driving growth. “While our IoT Scotland network provides great coverage, we found that in certain locations we could further increase our coverage by adopting additional connectivity options including NB-IoT, Sigfox and LTE-M.”
“When we engaged with Daizy, we found that the Daizy platform supported all IoT connectivity standards in a single platform. As Daizy are also integrated with IoT Scotland, we can ‘mix-and-match’ connectivity to meet the needs of any given customer project, without the complexity of having to manage connectivity on different platforms.”
Efficient IoT project delivery
As the number and scale of IoT projects develops, being able to deliver them efficiently has become increasingly important for North.
Mark explained some of the initial challenges North experienced. “In the early days, we were spending huge amounts of time and effort sourcing and then manually onboarding new sensors to support customer projects – everything from manually decoding the payloads through to publishing data and building integrations with dashboards.”
“Daizy is compatible with a huge catalogue of devices.”
After selecting Daizy to manage their IoT projects, Mark has seen efficiency continue to improve. “The fact that Daizy is compatible with a huge catalogue of devices, and that data coming out of the platform is standardised means that we never have to worry about searching for a technology solution to meet our customer’s needs – it just works.”
Daizy are also helping North to run more efficient deployments and manage sensors throughout their lifecycle. “Daizy is a great platform for managing deployments, where we can assign tasks to engineers, scan sensors during installation in the field and then quickly associate them to a physical location and project.” explained Alasdair. “After installation, sensors can be managed throughout their lifecycle until the battery has expired or the device needs replacing.”
“Daizy has enabled us to become more efficient.”
Alasdair Rettie, CTO
“Daizy has given us the ability to manage devices at scale and to deliver the high levels of service that our customers are looking for and expect from North. In terms of running deployments and managing IoT projects, Daizy has enabled us to become more efficient.”
Reducing friction and unlocking value
As the scale of IoT projects increases, so has the expectation in terms of capability and flexibility. “We’re engaged with one customer who has already delivered a small IoT proof of concept, and who have a mixed bag of IoT devices already deployed.” Explained Mark.
“Using Daizy we can simply onboard existing devices onto the platform and continue to operate them alongside any new sensors deployed. Our customers love that we are helping them to protect their existing investment rather than asking them to start again as they scale.”
“Our customers love that we are helping them to protect their existing investment.”
Alasdair added that it has been increasingly important for North to be able to align and then integrate IoT solutions into existing customer systems. “We realised that when deploying IoT solutions, customers don’t just want another dashboard or application, they often have their own analytics platforms or applications and what they really need is a feed of data.
“Daizy gives us a normalised feed of data, regardless of device or connectivity.”
Daizy gives us a normalised feed of data, regardless of device or connectivity. We can plug the data feed into almost any application, and we can also deliver use-case specific dashboards and business logic to suit each customer’s unique needs.”
Shortening time to value
I asked Alasdair about the impact Daizy has had on North’s product development roadmap. “Daizy has effectively allowed us to fast track our IoT offering as it’s removed the need to develop an in-house overarching IoT management platform. We can confidently deliver small to large scale projects while reducing human error and delivering to the customer’s requirements.”
“Daizy has effectively allowed us to fast track our IoT offering.”
From a customer engagement and project management perspective, Mark added that “Working with the Daizy team has been a really positive experience. Engagement from the start has been excellent and we have great access to all levels and functions within the business from technical and operational, through to commercial and senior level stakeholders.”
“Working with Daizy is the perfect example of how partnerships should work.”
“Our technical team have received great support and training so they intimately understand the Daizy platform when onboarding new customers. Working with Daizy is the perfect example of how partnerships should work.”
At Daizy we’re excited to be working with a leading player in the IoT market and we look forward to helping North continue their growth.
Ready to accelerate your IoT deployments? Get in touch today.
