Flex83 – The OEM IIoT & Digital Transformation Application Factory

Virtually all Industrial OEMs and Enterprises have two conflicting goals as they roll out IIoT and Digital Transformation applications. First, they need affordability in new application development and maintenance, as well as fast time-to-market. Second, and in direct conflict, they also need custom applications, because their IIoT solutions, like their products, are unique. But, until now, the IIoT ecosystem has not offered platform level solutions to resolve these conflicting goals.

 To date, options for fast time-to-market and lower cost have been limited to low-code / no-code RAD (Rapid Application Development) solutions, but these solutions severely limit the customization and differentiation that an OEM can deliver. As a result, they are not good long-term strategic options. On the other hand, alternatives that enable extensive customization and differentiation, like IoT-as-a-Service (IoTaaS) from AWS or Azure, or full-custom in-house (or contractor) developed, have been prohibitively expensive for all but the largest OEMs. And even for the largest OEMs, many of these programs have failed to meet expectation, especially with regards to time to maturity, cost to deliver, and full product-line transformation.

 But IoT83 has understood this conflict from the start. And now, the 4th generation of our Flex83 solution completely changes this dynamic and solves this conflict like no other solution. Now, Flex83 resolves and streamlines the conflicting needs of affordability, time to market, and differentiation-enabling customization. Historically categorized as an Application Enablement Platform, with the availability of the 4th generation of Flex83 is defining a brand new IIoT category – the Application Creation Factory.

To understand this better, we need to take a deeper look at how alternative solutions work:

• • First, let’s take the example of IoTaaS solutions. Aside from the very high cost of learning, constructing and validating enterprise-grade applications (and whatever platform you constructed) from the components that IoTaaS solutions provide, what you typically have in the end is the stand-alone application itself. Should you want to actually build application creation acceleration tools, that is another (very large) investment itself. And, should you want another application you will need to construct and maintain that as well from the sum of the IoTaaS components, including whatever custom code the application itself requires. So, this is not terrible efficient.
• • Next, let’s examine application creation using traditional Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs). Here you can build custom applications, but these will be limited to the opinionated constraints that the AEP tools and workflows provide. These tools and workflows do accelerate application creation, but they significantly limit the flexibility of created applications, and these new application must run in the set framework that the AEP provides. In the end, these applications also must run “on top of” the AEP itself, limiting portability and potentially scalability. And, your investment is forever tied to that AEP environment.
• • We already discussed the limitations of no/low-code RAD platforms, which even further limit your ability to build real differentiation. The same AEP vendor lock-in exists here.

By contrast, the Flex83 solution dramatically expands application creation flexibility while also minimizing development and maintenance costs and schedules. Further, anything developed at the “application layer” for your solution, due to the clean separation between the Flex83 platform and your application remains portable intellectual property.

Here is a short explanation of why the Flex83 platform is so far superior to alternatives:

• • First, the underlying architecture that ties all of the Flex83 services together is a highly cyber-secure, reliable, and scalable solution proven to over 65M devices connected. The system is Kubernetes based and includes a highly scalable enterprise data bus based on Kafka, massive MQTT scalability, high scale TCP/IP services, as well other big-data handling components. And, unlike IoTaaS, where each customer must learn the nuances of every component used, then painstakingly combine these into a platform, and finally actually build the custom application logic, the Flex83 platform is already fully defined and validated for scaled and reliable deployment “out-of-the-box” and the only thing customers worry about is the construction of the application itself.
• • On top of this layer, Flex83 provides over 30 “Core Platform Services”, ranging from device, database and 3rd party Connectors, to ETL transformations, to Analytics, to Identity Access Management (IAM), to Notifications, to Scheduling, to AI/ML Model Building and much more. Access to each of these Core Services is provided through secure APIs accessed via well documented SDK code, streamlining best-practices use of the Platform Core Services to build powerful applications. Unlike any other alternative, with Flex83, customers have full access to these services giving them a highly productive path to build virtually anything.
• • And above this layer, Flex83 provides the IIoT Asset Handler, or “Catalyst Application”. This application is ready to run out-of-the-box and multiple includes IIoT “generic functions” such as Remote Asset Monitoring, Remote Management, Automations, Rules Management, Notifications, IAM, AI/ML workflows, Predictive Maintenance models, and more. By using this Catalyst Applications that demonstrates step-by-step best practices and working code for using the platform Core Services and SDKs, customers can very quickly – and with minimal lines of new code – build full-custom applications to deliver whatever differentiation they can dream of.
• • Finally, the Flex83 platform also provides the Dashboard Studio application that uses low-code workflows to allow citizen developers, as well as data scientists to easily connect to virtually any data source (inside or outside of the platform), to perform transformations and normalizations on this data, to create “derived data” from different data sources, to implement custom analytics on the data, to push derived data to internal or external databases, to build drag-and-drop custom dashboards, and finally to publish applications created using the Dashboard Studio for access by other users.

When using the Flex83 “Application Factory”, the end-result is a clean and re-usable application, built with a very small number of new lines of code. By making surgical changes to the Catalyst code, the flow, context, and content of custom applications can be quickly modified. And because all “Application Layer” code is using the SDKs to access the Core Platform Services, where the actual “heavy lifting” of the application is done, these minor modifications leverage the huge volume of functionality that the Core Services provide. And, as any developer or program owner can attest, the number of new lines of code is directly proportional to program development and maintenance cost, as well as schedule.  No other IIoT or Digital Transformation solution or middleware enables this level of power and flexibility directly to customers. This is the magic of Flex83.  

The diagram below provides a high-level view of the Flex83 Application Creation Factory components described above:

Additionally, Flex83 is a multi-application, multi-device, multi-user solution. A Flex83 instance can run a single, or multiple applications, and includes DevOps tools for application management and auto-scaling. Finally, because Flex83 has been built using carefully curated open-source components along with our own custom development (all validated to be cyber-secure), your applications can run anywhere – on public or private clouds, or even in on-premise appliances.

The Flex83 Application Creation Factory is truly a new category of product that finally resolves the conflict in the IIoT and Digital Transformation ecosystem of providing: 1) a cost effective path to build and maintain enterprise-grade applications; 2) fast time-to-market to deliver applications; AND 3) the ability to deliver full-custom applications with no limits on application differentiation and market focus.

We encourage you to contact us for a demonstration – we are confident you will be glad that you did!